Privacy protections have been downgraded

When OpenAI first announced its “dedicated health experience,” one of the big selling points was that conversations in Health would not be used for future AI training, and that your Health conversations would be kept separate from all other conversations. But the terms have now shifted. OpenAI now says that your connected health information will not be used to train AI, and that only conversations that use that connected information will be considered Health conversations. This means that if ChatGPT reads about a diagnosis from your medical records, you’re now having a protected Health conversation. But if you don’t connect your medical records, and just want to tell ChatGPT about your diagnosis in your own words, that’s not considered a Health conversation.

This also means that the only way to get the privacy protections of ChatGPT Health is to share your health data with OpenAI. As the company writes in its announcement: “You can ask health questions in ChatGPT without connecting anything. To use Health and get responses grounded in your own information, you can choose to connect Apple Health, supported medical records from U. S. hospital systems, One Medical, or Function Health.

” The latter conversations would have privacy protections. The former would not.