OpenAI’s ChatGPT app for Mac was storing plain text conversations

If you’ve been using the ChatGPT Mac app, it’s highly recommended that you update it now. That’s because since its launch, the first desktop app for ChatGPT has been storing all of your conversations on your Mac in plain text. This means that other apps on your Mac, or anyone who gains access to your computer, can read every conversation you’ve ever had with OpenAI’s chatbot through the Mac app.

OpenAI has been made aware of the issue and has already released a patch that fixes the problem, but this is still a serious misstep from a company that wants to be seen as one that you can trust with your data.

Why is ChatGPT storing conversations in plain text a bad thing?

Your entire conversation history could be accessed on your Mac

Apple has always been careful about security on its devices, but the Mac is a little more lax than the iPhone. On your iPhone, all apps run in their own sandbox, ensuring that no app has access to any of the data from other apps outside that sandbox.

On Mac, many apps will also run in their own sandbox, too. However, it’s possible to grant apps access to your entire disk. The ChatGPT app doesn’t make use of a secure sandbox, meaning that its data is easily accessible.

Even worse, the data files are stored as plain text instead of being encrypted. As discovered by Pedro Jose Pereira Vieito, a data and electronics engineer who posted the information on Threads, it’s possible to locate these files on your Mac and open them, and read the entire contents of your ChatGPT conversations. If you are able to do so, then it means other apps on your Mac may be able to do so too, including any apps that are acting maliciously. Potentially, everything you’ve entered in a conversation in the ChatGPT Mac app, including sensitive personal information, could be accessed by others.

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This is quite concerning. We’re already giving ChatGPT a lot of information about ourselves when we interact with it, and this is likely to increase even further. A long-awaited update will add new features to ChatGPT, including the ability to respond to queries based on a real-time video stream from our phones or webcams. When this video content could deliberately or inadvertently include sensitive personal information, it’s concerning that OpenAI’s security is already showing some major flaws.

What has OpenAI done about the problem?

A patch has been released that encrypts conversations

Since being made aware of the issue, OpenAI has been quick to resolve it. The company has released an update that encrypts all of your conversations, so that they are no longer stored in plain text.

If you have automatic updates turned on, you may already be running this patched version of the macOS ChatGPT app. If you don’t, you can manually update the app.

1. Open the ChatGPT macOS app.
2. Click the ChatGPT menu in the menu bar.
3. Select Check for Updates.
4. Click Install to update to the latest version of the app.