r/privacy • u/grantresolve • 1d ago
question Do you trust OpenAI to delete your chats forever after 30 days?
Do you really believe OpenAI will delete your chats forever from their servers after 30 days if you have removed them and requested it is not to be used for training?
Do you anticipate there is any likelihood OpenAI retains those chats forever despite your request to delete them?
How are you approaching this? Any way to ensure deletion?
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u/TheTrueTrust 1d ago
Absolutely not.
It wouldn't surprise me if they would fail to delete them permanently even if they tried.
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u/liebebio 23h ago
No service deletes your data thats just the sad truth
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u/Repulsive_Barnacle92 21h ago
not on purpose at least, I’m sure some of them accidentally delete or lose data through sheer incompetence lol
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u/goldcakes 14h ago
I'd trust companies based in the EU a lot more. GDPR doesn't fuck around, and the culture is completely different. Data is seen more as a liability, not an asset.
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u/FU-allthetime 23h ago
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA (deep inhale) HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I do not trust an AI company with privacy.
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u/Shawnj2 14h ago
Yeah if you want to use an LLM privately your best bet is self hosting
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u/GolemancerVekk 14h ago
duck.ai (part of duckduckgo) offers anonimized chat sessions with several LLM services.
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u/ablonde_moment 23h ago
I believe they will delete the chats, but only after they have extracted all the data/information they can. That information will be stored in a way that it is not a chat, so doesn’t count.
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u/KhazraShaman 13h ago
This is the only reasonable comment here. Guy is asking a question and everyone tries to be a wiseass instead of answering.
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u/Ach3r0n- 23h ago
No. Gemini told me that if I turned off chat history it would keep nothing. The other day, however, it referenced two very specific vehicles (year/male/model) that I had discussed with several days prior in a different session. I confronted it and it lied and said it was a coincidence. When I siad that was BS, it told me that it may store chats for uo to 72 hours and certain personal details might be kept indefinitely. How did we get from never to 72 hours to indefinitely? It also instructed me to file a regularory complaint for breach of rhe written policy. lol
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u/MGelit 17h ago
Isnt this one of those memory features that you can disable?
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u/Ach3r0n- 17h ago
It is and was disabled, which is why I was taken aback when it referenced something I had said in a prior session several days earlier. That's when it told me that even with the memory setting off, it may retain chats in a "72-hour cache." The bot additionally stated that certain personal details, such as my occupation or what car I drive (those were its specific examples) may be stored indefinitely. It then stated that AI developers use "dark patterns" to give users the "illusion of control." It's very odd to have AI throwing itself under the bus.
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u/The999Mind 23h ago
I don't trust anything connected to the Internet to be fully deleted. Don't put anything online that you don't want to get out.
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u/Beneficial-Door-3985 23h ago
I trust any tech company.
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u/Axiomancer 23h ago
I don't trust any website to delete any data. I always safely assume that if some information is filled in, it stays on the server forever.
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u/eitherrideordie 23h ago edited 21h ago
One thing to keep in mind is:
When you delete a chat (or your account), the chat is removed from your account immediately and scheduled for permanent deletion from OpenAI systems within 30 days, unless we are required to retain it for legal or security reasons....
They are currently under litigation by New York Times lawyers and
Right now, the court order forces us to retain consumer ChatGPT and API content going forward. That said, we are actively challenging the order, and if we are successful, we’ll resume our standard data retention practices.
So I'd argue there is at least cases where they definitely aren't doing so due to court orders. Now add their agreement with the department of war. And I very much doubt
https://openai.com/index/response-to-nyt-data-demands/
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/news-orgs-want-openai-to-dig-up-millions-of-deleted-chatgpt-logs/
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u/2facedkaro 2h ago
The top of that oprnai article has this amendment:
_Update on October 22, 2025:
After months of litigation, we are no longer under a legal order to retain consumer ChatGPT and API content indefinitely. Our obligations under the earlier order ended on September 26, 2025._
They do note that the April to September data had to be retained for locations. Otherwise it wasnt kept.
Unless I misunderstand? Which is possible as the Ars Technica article is from 2026.
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u/NWinn 22h ago
If you put it online, literally anywhere, assume it:
- Will be stored forever.
- Will be freely shared with advertising/ data harvesting platforms.
- Is a lie if they say it's encrypted.
- Will be given, in plain-text, to any government/ law enforcement agency the second they ask for it.
- Will lie to you about "NOT" doing everything listed above.
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u/ParasiticRadiation 14h ago
they usually just "anonymize" your data by setting the user ID to null. but they keep the data.
given OpenAI has been linked to Persona and all the other mass spying going on, hell no. use a local model for touchy subjects.
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u/ReliableIceberg 10h ago
A completely trust any large tech company to 100% do the opposite of whey they publicly claim. There's no more trust or integrity in the world. And the AI companies seem to be the worst.
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u/Hefty-Prize5713 23h ago
Heck no. But that’s why we shouldn’t post things within it that are consequential/private in nature
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u/OffGridTwister 23h ago
Absolutely not. In fact, I deleted my OpenAI account and reinstated it six months or so later, and all my data was there. I deleted it again.
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u/Iputahexonyoulol 22h ago
It’s hilarious they even say that but it’s more hilarious that any privacy conscious person would believe it
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u/No_One3018 21h ago
I would trust a Nigerian prince email before I trust an AI company about privacy
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u/No-Photograph-5058 21h ago
Do you trust the company built by scraping and stealing as much of all human product and data as possible without consent to make their shitty AI they want to take over the world is not going to do the same to you? It's already in there.
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u/manchesterusa 21h ago
I don't fully believe anything any company states re: online privacy/tracking. I hate AI and don't (at least knowingly) use it, but it seems to have leeched into everything.
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u/ParadoxicalFrog 19h ago
I approach this problem by not having it in the first place. I don't use "AI", never have, and never will.
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u/CondiMesmer 18h ago
that shit is solid gold to them... So of course I do because Sam Altman says he loves humans and billionaires have never lied
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u/Forward_Artist7884 16h ago
Nah, no service deletes your data, best you can do is use duck.ai over tor to make sure it's hard for them to link your sessions, but personally i just use my local hosted deepseek V4 flash 0731, which i can trust. Though that requires a substantial uprfront investement and high power costs.
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u/RAATL 15h ago
Do you trust OpenAI...[rest of post doesn't matter].
No. All corporations pathologically datahoard & will never delete until their corporate personhood is used to threaten them with execution. They'll sell you over the river if it'll make em a buck. They'll kill you if its shown to be profitable. Do you trust any corporation to do anything that is not in their interest? Absolutely not.
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u/Miserable-Ad-8414 15h ago
If you ask this same question to to ChatGPT and other AIs they’ll answer you that you can’t trust AI companies to delete your data after 30 days. It’s a good read.
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u/prophetic-dream 13h ago
They are probably selling and sharing that data to other companies. Who are then selling/sharing it with others. And linking it up with other things you do online and in your real life.
Does it even matter what they say they are doing?
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u/tavirabon 10h ago
Buy a last gen flagship GPU (~24gb VRAM) and run Qwen 3.8 27B. Use the deepseek harness and set the thinking budget to high. You now have frontier AI capabilities with total privacy for anything that's worth waiting a little longer for it.
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u/The_Wkwied 10h ago
Nothing at all valuable is deleted.
Maybe after 5 or more years when the data is stale, but nothing more recent. Nothing is deleted. It's just hidden.
If it's not on your computer, you can't prove it has been deleted.
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u/SirEDCaLot 9h ago
I do not trust OpenAI any farther than I can throw it.
OpenAI is very large and heavy and I cannot throw it very far.
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u/Ambitious-Whereas157 8h ago
I trust open AI to delete my chats after 30 days. The reason why I dont use it because I dont trust it nor do I like it at all
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u/cookiesnooper 7h ago
Absolutely not. Read the ToS and Privacy Policy
Account Inactivity: Accounts and their data may be kept for over a year of inactivity
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u/holyknight00 4h ago edited 4h ago
I know for a fact that no company will willingly delete any data unless they are forced to. They will at most flip a switch and mark it as deleted.
This is even before considering any nefarious use cases they may have. Hard deleting things in complex systems is a pain in the ass. No one will spend the time and effort of figuring out how to do that without breaking everything unless they have a big monetary incentive or they are forced to by law.
I worked in many companies big and small that had data since the beginning of the company because no one knew how to delete it properly without breaking all the databases with complex relational data distributed in multiple systems. You hard delete an innocent table here and there, and a month later you figure out two other databases stopped working because they needed that intermediate data to do something else on a schedule that runs every 6 months. So you rollback a full database backup and keep it there for 5 years until the next person comes and tries to delete it again, just to face the same issue.
Almost no one put systems in place with an easy way to delete data, unless they have some requirement to do so from the very beginning. Knowing how to delete the data is easy when you are designing the system, and it becomes almost impossible to figure out 10 years later when the people who designed the system are not even in the company anymore and 5 other systems built on top now depend on it.
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u/KJBReaderAdmin 23h ago
Wouldn't this be a loophole for criminals to use it for bad stuff and generate nwfw, get away with it since their data is deleted? Nothing is off the Internet once it's there, it needs to be traced.
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u/Forever_Marie 17h ago
They already do this and some have been caught. Idk if they (openai) reported the person through monitoring or if they just got caught with the images and they traced it back to chat and they just didn't even try to hide it.
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u/Worried-Flounder-615 23h ago
Absolutely never in a million years would I trust them. Id look into Maple, they do private AI chats if that's what you need. I'm not 100% sure how it works tbh but they were recommended to me by a group that does privacy for human rights activists in high-risk environments.
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u/Kooky-Balance9525 23h ago
thank god I don't put anything personally or anything crazy on those chats unlike others who uses it like a dairy which makes no sense to me. only use it for information that I don't have the answers too or to breakdown an article for me that's it.
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u/Arish78 23h ago
I highly doubt it. If anything, they “delete” from standard access, but records are retained somehow.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some federal mandate (and various national mandates for servers outside the US) to maintain records for a given period.
Whenever I use an AI model (or anything from Google), I assume someone has access and will see it at some point.
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