If you’re already a fan of having conversations with artificial intelligence — whether it be with a widely used chatbot like ChatGPT or the up-and-coming Claude 2, or with an avatar that you’ve made yourself with a program such as Character.AI — the last thing that may be on your mind is whether or not your chats are able to be seen by others.
Sharing personal and private information over the internet has always been a subject that is steeped in controversy, due to the fact that cyber criminals, hackers, and even businesses and governments could use your sensitive data for nefarious purposes.
So now, you may be wondering, are Character.AI chats private? Read on to find out what we discovered…
Are Character.AI Chats Private?
According to Character.AI’s own privacy policy, when it comes to the secrecy of your conversations with the AI character avatars that you create, you really don’t have anything to worry about.
The Character.AI privacy policy states that, “We gather data that, either alone or combined with other information we possess, has the potential to identify you (“Personal Information”)”.
And that data of which the service speaks of can include things like:
- Your name, email, and any other contact information that you may provide, as well as the full content of any messages that you send directly to the service;
- Any personal information that you share on your social media, which includes posts from Facebook, Instagram, Medium, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. In addition, the above listed social media companies can provide Character.AI with the data and analytics of your social media pages;
- Your login data, which is automatically sent by your browser whenever you visit Character.AI. This data includes your IP address, the details of the browser you’re using, as well as all of your interaction history;
- Your cookies (find out more about this below); and
- Your device and usage information, which includes not only your device and operating system details, but also all of the content that you’ve viewed when using Character.AI, the duration and frequency of your usage, and any actions that you take.
So, when you get down to the nitty gritty, this means that technically, everything you do within Character.AI — which includes every conversation you have with a character bot while using the service — is only private in the sense that it can’t be seen by anyone else using the platform, including the creator and other users of the bot you’re interacting with.
However, it should also be noted that if the user hits the share button during a conversation, this will start a public feed, and so all Character.AI users will be able to view it. That could include your attempts at making NSFW Character.AI Art.
Inside Operation
You should also keep in mind that Character.AI itself isn’t encrypted. This means that certain members of the staff will be able to read all of your chats, although it is done in order for them to work on and improve the AI model, which will help to keep it free from hackers and other malicious attacks.
You should also keep in mind that Character.AI itself isn’t encrypted. This means that certain members of the staff will be able to read all of your chats, although it is done in order for them to work on and improve the AI model, which will help to keep it free from hackers and other malicious attacks.
So basically, this means it would be a wise choice not to share anything overly sensitive or personal with the bots you interact with on Character.AI, whether you’ve created them yourself or not.
And as further evidence that you should heed this warning, there’s been discussion on the Reddit threads about Character.AI users being affected by a bug that allowed for other people’s chats to be randomly leaked into other user chats.
Essentially what this means is that whenever you use the service, you are taking the risk of your chats being about as private as shouting your darkest secrets from the roof of a crowded shopping mall.
And if that wasn’t enough to keep you on your guard, all of the conversations that you have are stored by the company, and so can be accessible to anyone who has control over the platform.
Therefore, you should always assume that anything you share with Character.AI has the potential of not being private or confidential. So, you need to be cautious about sharing any personal information with your character avatars whenever you’re using this service.
The Cookies On The Table
According to Character.AI’s own privacy policy, the company uses cookies to operate its website, so that the company can gather usage data, which it claims will enhance your browsing experience.
Cookies are created whenever you load a website into your browser. They can be used to store your login information, but also all the activities you do when using websites, so they act like a digital bookmark that allow you to pick up where you left off the last time that you visited the site.
Character.AI’s own cookies policy states that, “various online analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, employ cookies to help us analyze site usage and improve your experience”. What this means is that the platform, as well as any of its service providers, can use their cookies, or other tracking technologies, to monitor you when using Character.AI, and also your social media.
In addition, at present the service doesn’t react to “Do Not Track” signals if you choose to not enable the cookies. Plus, the cookies Character.AI uses can have varying lifetimes, so they might expire after a certain period, or can remain hidden in your browser until a set expiration date.
This is something that you should keep in mind, especially if the information that you share when conversing with your chatbots contains sensitive details, or could be deemed offensive by others.
Final Thoughts
These days, it would be silly to believe that anything you share in the digital space can remain private, considering that even in the real world, we’re constantly being monitored, and anyone of the TikTok generation doesn’t even have a concept of what privacy actually means.
With this in mind, if you so decide to use Character.AI to have conversations in the meta space, just remember to proceed with caution.
So, are Character.AI chats private? It’s best to stick to the logic of “better safe than sorry”. They may technically be private, but unless you want to risk the chatbots sharing your secrets with the wider digital world, you should be careful.
Never trust an avatar to keep your private information concealed from prying eyes.
