Every time you discussed worrying health symptoms with ChatGPT or asked for financial advice about mounting credit card debt, you believed the chats remained private. However, a new lawsuit filed in the United States says you were wrong.
OpenAI is now facing a federal class-action lawsuit accusing the company of doing something its users never agreed to: sharing their private chat data with Meta and Google.
The lawsuit was filed on May 13 in a California federal court by plaintiff Amargo Couture. She claims OpenAI quietly embedded Meta's Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics tracking codes inside the ChatGPT website. These are the same tools that follow you around the internet, serving ads for products after you Googled them once.
Every query you typed, your account ID, and email address were allegedly being scooped up and forwarded to two of the world's biggest advertising companies.
ChatGPT has evolved into a platform where millions of users pour their most sensitive moments, trusting OpenAI to safeguard their information. However, the lawsuit alleges that the AI model was used to collect users’ chats and hand them over to advertising giants.
If you were logged into Facebook or Google at the same time, the lawsuit says, those conversations could be directly tied back to your identity.
The case has no hearing date yet and OpenAI has also not responded yet. However, its privacy policy does mention sharing data with third-party partners, which its lawyers will likely lean on heavily. Legal experts say that fine print could dilute the case, but that doesn't make the practice any less unsettling.
Also Read: Microsoft Explores New AI Partnerships Amid OpenAI Dependence Concerns
OpenAI isn't alone in the dock. A near-identical case was filed against Perplexity AI just weeks ago. The message from courts and users is getting harder to ignore. The industrial shift cannot come at the cost of basic human privacy.