That's the discussion I stumbled upon this week, following reporting from Eileen Guo of MIT Technology Review. In the piece, Guo reviews a series of claims from users who say that chatbots have been sharing personal information, like phone numbers, when requested. In some cases, the chatbots would share the info when the person in question asked for it; in other cases, however, it was strangers reaching out for details. In one example, a software engineer from Israel received a message from an unknown contact via WhatsApp, requesting assistance with their payment app. When the engineer asked how the stranger got their WhatsApp info, they sent back a screenshot, showing how Gemini shared the details when requested. The engineer later found a single source on the internet containing his phone number: a Quora post from 2015.
The deeper issue is that our information appears all over the internet, whether we know it or not. We might have personal contact information present on websites we may or may not remember posting on; town and city websites may have our personal information attached to public records, even if those results don't tend to appear at the top of a typical Google Search. Because AI is capable of performing deep dives through all these web results, however, it's capable of finding obscure results and surfacing them, potentially exposing your details.
But these guardrails are far from perfect. Guo highlights a case in which a University of Washington PhD student searched for the contact information of their friend on Gemini. The bot returned with that friend's research, but also their phone number. The friend later confirmed she had shared her phone number online as part of a technology workshop, but never intended for it to be visible to anyone who asked for it. (Gemini could not find or would not share my personal contact info either, but was happy to share my X account.)
Can you remove your phone number from chatbots' datasets?
Perhaps, then, the most realistic approach to take is to get this information off the public internet as much as possible. If you live in California, you can use this portal to request that data brokers remove your information from their databases. You can also look into any number of personal data removal tools, like Incogni or DeleteMe, to attempt to accomplish the same. However, while these may remove your information from some corners of the internet, there's not much you can do if the AI companies already have your information in their datasets.
The sad reality here is that AI technology outpaced regulations around personal privacy. Had lawmakers stepped up to ensure that we all had the option to opt out of these data collection practices, we might have been able to nip the problem in the bud. But as of now, the best we can really do is ask that our information be taken down and not used—and, if it gets too bad, change our contact information outright.
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