The problem has since been resolved, but it begs the question of how such an oversight happened in the first place.
The partnership between Apple and OpenAI is off to a rocky start as ChatGPT users on macOS recently learned their conversations were being stored in plain-text files.
Apple has positioned itself as a company that prioritizes privacy in a market where many of its competitors reap a lion’s share of their profits by selling or repurposing user data. But, as demonstrated by data and electronics engineer Pedro José Pereira Vieito in a post on Meta’s Threads, somebody dropped the ball when it came to OpenAI’s third-party integration of ChatGPT on macOS.
ChatGPT was released on macOS in May to subscribers. General access for non-subscriber accounts was made available on June 25. Until Friday, July 5, however, the app stored all chat logs in unencrypted plain-text files on users’ hard drives.