ChatGPT Mac safety flaw raises purple flags forward of Apple Intelligence integration
In an embarrassing growth so quickly after Apple’s AI bulletins at WWDC, it emerged this week that the ChatGPT app for Mac has been failing to sandbox conversations, that means the info may be simply accessed by different apps or anybody else who has entry to your machine.
Pedro José Pereira Vieito outlined his considerations on Threads earlier this week.
“The OpenAI ChatGPT app on macOS shouldn’t be sandboxed,” he defined, “and shops all of the conversations in plain-text in a non-protected location:
~/Library/Utility Assist/com.openai.chat/conve…{uuid}/
So mainly another operating app / course of / malware can learn all of your ChatGPT conversations with none permission immediate.”
Pereira Vieito demonstrated to The Verge {that a} second app may entry ChatGPT’s logs and present you the textual content of a dialog instantly after it occurred. That’s not how issues are alleged to work on the Mac, which has a coverage of knowledge siloing, or sandboxing, so that every app is unable to see different apps’ knowledge with out express permission.
As The Verge studies, the flaw was patched with an replace shortly after it raised the difficulty with OpenAI. However doubts regarding the service’s trustworthiness might stay.
And never only for OpenAI. Apple has lengthy trumpeted its personal pro-security and pro-privacy credentials, and solely final month introduced that OpenAI can be the primary and highest-profile companion for the brand new Apple Intelligence challenge. When this AI function launches later this yr, most duties will likely be dealt with by Apple’s personal techniques, however sure duties will likely be handed off to third-party bots… with the consumer’s permission. Apple says ChatGPT in Apple Intelligence will obscure IP addresses and requests gained’t saved.
Google Gemini and different third-party AI assistants are additionally anticipated to affix Apple Intelligence, however ChatGPT is the one confirmed chatbot for now.
