Chatbots are building intimate “algorithmic self-portraits” of users as they retain information to offer a hyper-personalized experience, researchers warn.
A recent study, conducted by a coalition of scientists in Germany, India and the Netherlands and presented at the ACM Web Conference 2026, investigated the ways that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has tracked and made sense of user inputs to develop comprehensive digital profiles of users.
In an already-personalized era of digital life defined by data-powered recommendation algorithms, the study urges that chatbot memory offers a “new form of personalization derived from users’ self-disclosed information divulged within private conversations,” a reality that poses privacy risks and which the researchers believe demands “closer examination of the underlying mechanisms that enable such personalization.”
Drawing on the donated chat logs of 80 real-world ChatGPT users who obtained their conversation history by way of European data privacy laws, the researchers were able to identify 2,050 memory entries across the AI interactions of 65 users.
