ChatGPT Suffers First Major Personal Data Breach
ChatGPT Suffers First Data Breach, Exposes Personal Information
5 MINUTE READ
Dom Nicastro avatar
By Dom Nicastro
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MARCH 24, 2023
DIGITAL EXPERIENCE
19
The perils of technology: With so many people using ChatGPT, the potential for data breaches is great. And ChatGPT had its first significant breach.
The Gist
Trouble in chatbot paradise. OpenAI's ChatGPT suffered a data breach on March 20.
Fixes going forward? OpenAI has taken various action steps to address the issue.
OpenAI's ChatGPT has suffered its first major personal data breach.
The breach came during a March 20 outage and exposed payment-related and other personal information of 1.2% of the ChatGPT Plus subscribers who were active during a specific nine-hour window, according to a blog post by OpenAI Friday, March 24.
"In the hours before we took ChatGPT offline on Monday, it was possible for some users to see another active user’s first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date. Full credit card numbers were not exposed at any time," OpenAI officials wrote today.
What's the big message to marketers and customer experience professionals? Fascinating as the world's most popular chatbot is — and how it can aid marketing and customer experience campaigns — this is another avenue where people feed technology with personal data. And data privacy is paramount. Look no further than US Congress' grilling this week of TikTok's CEO.
Open-Source Bug Led to Breach Discoveries
Why did OpenAI take ChatGPT offline in the first place? Officials said they found a bug in an open-source library, which allowed some users to see titles from another active user’s chat history. "It’s also possible that the first message of a newly created conversation was visible in someone else’s chat history if both users were active around the same time," OpenAI officials said.
The company patched the bug and reported technical details of this problem. However, as the company patched the bug, that's when it discovered the same bug may have caused breach of more personal data.
we had a significant issue in ChatGPT due to a bug in an open source library, for which a fix has now been released and we have just finished validating.
a small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history.
we feel awful about this.
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 22, 2023
5 MINUTE READ
Dom Nicastro avatar
By Dom Nicastro
Follow
MARCH 24, 2023
DIGITAL EXPERIENCE
19
The perils of technology: With so many people using ChatGPT, the potential for data breaches is great. And ChatGPT had its first significant breach.
The Gist
Trouble in chatbot paradise. OpenAI's ChatGPT suffered a data breach on March 20.
Fixes going forward? OpenAI has taken various action steps to address the issue.
OpenAI's ChatGPT has suffered its first major personal data breach.
The breach came during a March 20 outage and exposed payment-related and other personal information of 1.2% of the ChatGPT Plus subscribers who were active during a specific nine-hour window, according to a blog post by OpenAI Friday, March 24.
"In the hours before we took ChatGPT offline on Monday, it was possible for some users to see another active user’s first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date. Full credit card numbers were not exposed at any time," OpenAI officials wrote today.
What's the big message to marketers and customer experience professionals? Fascinating as the world's most popular chatbot is — and how it can aid marketing and customer experience campaigns — this is another avenue where people feed technology with personal data. And data privacy is paramount. Look no further than US Congress' grilling this week of TikTok's CEO.
Open-Source Bug Led to Breach Discoveries
Why did OpenAI take ChatGPT offline in the first place? Officials said they found a bug in an open-source library, which allowed some users to see titles from another active user’s chat history. "It’s also possible that the first message of a newly created conversation was visible in someone else’s chat history if both users were active around the same time," OpenAI officials said.
The company patched the bug and reported technical details of this problem. However, as the company patched the bug, that's when it discovered the same bug may have caused breach of more personal data.
we had a significant issue in ChatGPT due to a bug in an open source library, for which a fix has now been released and we have just finished validating.
a small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history.
we feel awful about this.
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 22, 2023
