Chat at your own risk! Data brokers are selling deeply personal bot transcripts

[erronis]

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/03/chatbot_data_harvesting_personal_info/

AI conversations for sale include sensitive health and legal details

Your latest chat transcript could be bought and sold. Data brokers are selling access to sensitive personal data captured during chatbot conversations, despite claims that the data is anonymized and obtained with consent.

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People install browser extensions that purport to offer free VPN service or ad blocking or some other capability, likely without reading or understanding the extension's privacy policy.

These extensions may silently intercept users' communications with AI services like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek. They can do so by overriding the browser's native fetch() and XMLHttpRequest() functions in order to capture every prompt and every response.

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The most damning finding, he said in his report, is that "healthcare workers are pasting real patient data into AI chatbots, and that data is now a commercial database."

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The result, the report claims, is that customers of these data brokers can search and find conversations about suicide, medical records that may enable identification, HIV lab results, abortion clinic searches, immigration status disclosures, domestic violence narratives, and children's conversations.

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