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

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.

Lee S Dryburgh, an expert in AI visibility for consumer health and longevity brands, explained how this works in a report provided to The Register.

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.

"This data is captured from real people's private AI conversations via browser extensions, stored in a vector database, and exposed via API to authenticated ...