Proton’s AI Paper Trail tool shows how much AI chatbots know about you
Your chatbot use can reveal who you are with “uncomfortable accuracy.”
Image by Cybernews.
- Proton launched AI Paper Trail to show what ChatGPT and Claude may infer from users’ exported conversation data.
- The tool generates a privacy profile, exposure score, and estimated dollar value for data shared with AI platforms.
- AI Paper Trail currently supports ChatGPT and Claude, with support for additional AI services planned later.
- Proton says uploaded export files are deleted after analysis and are not stored on its servers.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
Swiss privacy-focused tech company Proton has released a new tool that demonstrates how much ChatGPT or Claude knows about you: AI Paper Trail.
In the world of big tech, personal data is considered extremely valuable. It allows tech companies to create comprehensive, detailed personal and behavioral profiles, which can be worth thousands of dollars to advertisers and data brokers.
The same information is also being used to train large language models, or LLMs. This is exactly why AI tools are designed to collect as much data as possible.
This isn’t limited to personal details such as your name, date of birth, email address, postal address, phone number, gender, location, and device and network data.
It also includes much more intimate information, such as conversations and responses you had with an AI chatbot, documents and files you uploaded, how often you chat with an LLM, how long these sessions last, what features you use, and so forth.
“A single prompt might not give away much about you. But weeks or months of them — whether it’s drafting work emails, getting advice for personal health and relationships, or just something you were too embarrassed to Google — can reveal who you are with uncomfortable accuracy,” Proton says in a recently published blog.
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To give users more insight into how much privacy-sensitive data AI tools hold about their users, Proton developed a tool called AI Paper Trail.
AI Paper Trail currently only works with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, though other AI platforms will be supported soon. Users can export their conversation data from these AI platforms and upload the export file to AI Paper Trail.
Proton’s tool then analyzes the data and generates a report detailing what ChatGPT and Claude know about their users. The report also includes a Privacy Type, a personality label based on a user’s approach to data privacy, and an AI Exposure Score, a numerical score based on the number of data points extracted and how much they reveal. Lastly, it gives a personal data value, an amount in dollars of what your data is worth to an AI platform.
However, how these numbers are calculated remains unclear.
Proton promises that the data users share with AI Paper Trail is deleted as soon as it’s been analyzed and will never be stored on Proton’s servers. The company also offers shareable reports to raise awareness among friends, family, and colleagues who may not be aware of the privacy risks.
