ChatGPT’s much-heralded Mac app was storing conversations as plain text

There really wasn’t an expectation of privacy with this. This is not a surprise.

So many apps use sqlite or json files for storage without encryption; this doesn't seem like much of a discovery.

In any case, don't share PII or any of your deepest, darkest secrets with it.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

OpenAI announced its Mac desktop app for ChatGPT with a lot of fanfare a few weeks ago, but it turns out it had a rather serious security issue: user chats were stored in plain text, where any bad actor could find them if they gained access to your machine.

As Threads user Pedro José Pereira Vieito noted earlier this week, "the OpenAI ChatGPT app on macOS is not sandboxed and stores all the conversations in plain-text in a non-protected location," meaning "any other running app / process / malware can read all your ChatGPT conversations without any permission prompt."

OpenAI chose to opt-out of the sandbox and store the conversations in plain text in a non-protected location, disabling all of these built-in defenses.

OpenAI has now updated the app, and the local chats are now encrypted, though they are still not sandboxed.

It's not a great look for OpenAI, which recently entered into a partnership with Apple to offer chat bot services built into Siri queries in Apple operating systems.

Apple detailed some of the security around those queries at WWDC last month, though, and they're more stringent than what OpenAI did (or to be more precise, didn't do) with its Mac app, which is a separate initiative from the partnership.

The original article contains 291 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 27%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!