Your data will be stolen and sold
AI systems depend on immense quantities of personal data, creating stronger incentives to collect, combine, and monetize information people never meaningfully agreed to share.
AI is eroding our control over our own data. AI systems are so data-hungry and opaque that people have even less control over what is collected about them, how it’s used, and how to remove it. Personal information shared for one purpose is being repurposed to train AI, often without people’s knowledge or consent.1
- Stanford researchers found all six major U.S. AI developers appear to train on users’ chats by default, and some keep that data indefinitely.2
- Four of the six appear to train on children’s chat data.2
- Even Anthropic began training on Claude conversations by default in 2025 unless users opt out.3
Regulators have already found real harm.
- Italy fined OpenAI 15 million euros for training ChatGPT on personal data without an adequate legal basis.4
- The FTC found Rite Aid’s AI facial recognition falsely flagged customers as shoplifters, without telling them it was in use.5 They did this despite the fact that the technology was unreliable (their surveillance resulted in thousands of false positives).
Legislators currently appear to be asleep at the wheel as our data is being taken faster than regulation can keep up. There is a disturbing irony in a situation in which data is taken from customers without their knowledge or explicit consent, then used to train AI models that pose risks such as job displacement, climate disaster, and even outright extinction threats.