ChatGPT for macOS Raises Concerns Over Storing Plain Text Conversations

OpenAI recently launched an official ChatGPT app for macOS, which is also the first ChatGPT app for a desktop platform. While having an app makes the process of talking to the chatbot easier, some users have raised privacy concerns. This is because the app stores all conversations in plain text, which can expose sensitive user data.

Update: After our article was published, OpenAI released an updated ChatGPT app to encrypt conversations stored on the Mac. Make sure to update your ChatGPT app to the latest version. You can also read the original article below.

As developer Pedro Vieito pointed out in a Threads post, the official ChatGPT app for Mac doesn’t use macOS’s standard sandboxing system. When looking at the preferences and cache files stored by the app, Vieito noticed that all conversations recorded in the app are kept in plain text, making this data easily accessible to anyone.

But what exactly does all this mean and why isn’t the ChatGPT app sandboxed?

Privacy and Sandboxed Applications on macOS

For those who don’t know, “sandboxing” is a security control system that runs an application and all of its data in an isolated environment. This way, the application cannot access other parts of the system without permission, just as other applications cannot easily read the data of a sandboxed application.

On iOS, all third-party apps run under a sandbox. But on Mac, this system was only implemented with OS X Lion in 2011. Years later, with macOS Mojave, Apple added new layers of security so that apps always ask the user for permission to access data outside their sandbox.

However, while running an app in a sandbox makes everything more secure, it’s still optional on macOS because some more complex apps require full disk access. And there are plenty of macOS apps that aren’t sandboxed. However, when it comes to chat apps that handle sensitive data, most of them are sandboxed.

But what are the implications for users?

Reading ChatGPT conversations without consent is quite easy

Anyone can find the ChatGPT app conversations by going to Library > Application Support > com.openai.chat. And since the conversations are stored outside of a sandbox and in plain text, this also means that other apps, processes, or even malware running on the Mac can access them, without the user knowing.

9to5Mac We were able to confirm that ChatGPT conversations are stored in plain text. We also created a tool to collect data from the ChatGPT app with just one click, and it works without asking for any permissions.

Of course, OpenAI’s privacy policies clearly state that all your conversations with ChatGPT may be collected by the company to improve its language model. That in itself is a good reason to never share sensitive data with ChatGPT. But knowing that this data could end up in anyone’s hands makes things even worse.

We’d like to believe that OpenAI simply made a mistake by not sandboxing the ChatGPT app. But as of now, OpenAI has yet to comment on user concerns.

And if you’re really concerned about privacy, a good way to protect your data on macOS is to only download apps from the Mac App Store or check whether an app downloaded from an external source runs in a sandbox.

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