The AI giant OpenAI revealed to users on Thursday that it will enable marketing cookies for free users of ChatGPT in a revamp of the company’s privacy policies.
In an email sent to users, the AI company outlined that it will “now use cookies to promote OpenAI products and services on other websites”.
Cookies track and collect information from a website user as they search and browse the internet. From now, the data OpenAI collects from users navigating ChatGPT could be used to inform its own marketing.
Tracking Cookies Now Default for Free Users
The move from OpenAI is reportedly driven by the need to convert ChatGPT users to paying subscribers. Reports suggest that for free users, the setting that enables the use of cookies is automatically enabled.
The company is currently multi-tiered, including its budget ‘Go’ tier which costs £8 per month, ‘Plus’ which costs £16-£20 a month, ‘Pro’ which costs £80-£100 a month, ‘Pro Max’ which is £200 a month, and its ‘Business’ tier, which is roughly £20 per user/month.
Despite the major shift, the company said this change won’t impact a person’s conversations in the tool, which will remain private and won’t be shared with marketing partners.
Conversations Over Cookies
OpenAI launched ads in ChatGPT in February for its US users, marking itself as the first LLM to show ads in its AI chatbot interface.
Since, questions have been raised from users around how their data will be used to inform how they will be advertised to.
However, OpenAI maintains that these updates are simply to ‘clarify’ existing processes. In an official statement, the company stressed that users can opt out at any time and that the data shared is limited to technical identifiers like cookie IDs rather than actual chat logs.
“Like many companies, OpenAI works with select marketing partners to help people learn about our products on third-party websites and apps, and we updated our privacy policy to clarify how this works,” said an OpenAI spokesperson.
“We do not share your conversations with these marketing partners. To make OpenAI marketing efforts more relevant and measure their effectiveness, we may share limited identifiers, such as cookie IDs or device IDs, and users can opt out at any time in settings.”
Recent reports indicate OpenAI is already hiring ad executives in London as it prepares to bring its marketing platform to the UK and EU.
To comply with local privacy laws, the company is reportedly building a new consent management system that will require European users to explicitly ‘opt-in’ before tracking pixels can fire – a stricter standard than the ‘opt-out’ approach currently used in the US.
