If you were one of the many who downloaded OpenAI’s much-anticipated Mac app a few weeks ago we have some bad news: that app has been storing the conversations you've had with it as plain text, so that anyone who gained access to your machine could find them.
The issue, which comes just days after news surfaced that Open AI was hacked last year, was initially spotted by Threads user Pedro José Pereira Vieito who noted:
"The OpenAI ChatGPT app on macOS is not sandboxed and stores all the conversations in plain-text in a non-protected location: ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.openai.chat/conve…{uuid}/," he wrote. "So basically any other running app / process / malware can read all your ChatGPT conversations without any permission prompt."
In a subsequent post he noted "macOS has blocked access to any user private data since macOS Mojave 10.14 (6 years ago!). Any app accessing private user data (Calendar, Contacts, Mail, Photos, any third-party app sandbox, etc.) now requires explicit user access. OpenAI chose to opt-out of the sandbox and store the conversations in plain text in a non-protected location, disabling all of these built-in defenses."
Since his posting, ChatGPT has updated the app so that local chats are at least encrypted, but the messages still are not sandboxed, Ars Technica notes.
Even so, you’ll want to make sure you’re using the most recent version of the app on your device.