So whats the issue here? Ohh no my private documents are in plain text on my private computer fucking morons.
Linux nerd water cooler chat.
“One of the great things about Linux is that everything can be treated as a text file… Hey wait a minute, ChatGPT is using fucking plaintext files??”
Apple has been running ad campaigns about how “Safari is a private browser” lately. The irony of screwing this up, when they even sandbox your Downloads folder
How is that related to OpenAI’s app? It’s not an Apple product.
Oh I’m an idiot. Thought this was an official MacOS app.
Microsoft’s much-heralded Notepad.exe was storing files as plain text
Same level of security concern. Quit putting your sensitive data into apps that aren’t meant for it.
I store almost everyfuck in plain text, so what?
Oh, somebody wants to use techbro stuff and expect security.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
OpenAI announced its Mac desktop app for ChatGPT with a lot of fanfare a few weeks ago, but it turns out it had a rather serious security issue: user chats were stored in plain text, where any bad actor could find them if they gained access to your machine.
As Threads user Pedro José Pereira Vieito noted earlier this week, “the OpenAI ChatGPT app on macOS is not sandboxed and stores all the conversations in plain-text in a non-protected location,” meaning “any other running app / process / malware can read all your ChatGPT conversations without any permission prompt.”
OpenAI chose to opt-out of the sandbox and store the conversations in plain text in a non-protected location, disabling all of these built-in defenses.
OpenAI has now updated the app, and the local chats are now encrypted, though they are still not sandboxed.
It’s not a great look for OpenAI, which recently entered into a partnership with Apple to offer chat bot services built into Siri queries in Apple operating systems.
Apple detailed some of the security around those queries at WWDC last month, though, and they’re more stringent than what OpenAI did (or to be more precise, didn’t do) with its Mac app, which is a separate initiative from the partnership.
The original article contains 291 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 27%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
There really wasn’t an expectation of privacy with this. This is not a surprise.
This is why Apple partnered with them. To keep an eye on them.
Microsoft’s much-heralded Word app was storing documents as unencrypted DOCX files leaving them viewable by any malware.
