Character AI does not track users; it does not store personal data, track locations, or integrate with external databases, ensuring privacy during each session.
No Personal Data Storage
When communicating with Character AI no personal information that users provide during the interaction. This way, the approach ensures an exceptionally high level of privacy because there is no database that is potentially storing the user’s name, age, or any other personal identifiers. Unlike the interaction with Google Maps or Facebook, there are no millions of years after which the history of your precautions and the characters you created will be permanently stored. Similarly, if you look at different websites and later see the advertisements for those same websites on other websites or social media – it will not happen with Character AI. Thus, personal data provided during interactions is not saved by the platform.
In simple terms, it means that if you ask a question to Character AI about health advice or financial planning, no one will remember or record that you have asked such a question before. For instance, if during one of the sessions a user says: “I have a lot of financial resources and I want to invest in an aggressive investment plan” – this data will remain in the chat and will disappear automatically as soon as the session ends. It is similar to telling an unknown person you meet in the train that you have similar plans and complaints – the session ends as soon as one of the parties stands up and moves to another vestibule. Another comparable situation is speaking with the bartender, trying to persuade him of your sufficient income to ensure that the drinks are free for you that evening. Lastly, while consumers are becoming more and more aware of online privacy issues, this innovation is particularly important in 2023 and beyond. In 2023 only, as per DNSlytics, 1,200 breaches compromised the personal information of hundreds of millions of users. Therefore, if healthcare providers, lawyers, financial advisors, or therapists use an AI Character to assist them in their professional activities, the absence of data storage means that their questions and sensitive information about the health condition or the case of their client will not be recorded anywhere. The phenomenon can also be useful for users who are concerned about marketing approaches and ad targeting that still uses all past session records of the user even if no Character AI is used at the current moment.
Session-Based Interaction
The Character AI uses a session-based interaction model, meaning that no context or data from your conversation will be tracked after the session ends, as it will be cleared. This archetypal is akin to deleting your browser cache, making sure each conversation will be as fresh as a daisy, as there is no memory of past communicationd. This approach has significant advantages in terms of user privacy.
For instance, when you visit an online store or two to be exact, your recent browsing history, including the products you viewed and bought, can influence the ads or recommendations on their frontpages, made by the store based on the data from your previous visit. In the case of Character AI, one session’s conversation about a specific product or shopping behavior will not affect the second session’s things that you may see or be told later.
This feature markedly affects the level of trust that the user has towards the AI. In the case of discussing, say, financial plans, the user doesn’t have to worry about the confidentiality of this information’s reliance on them – they can communicate freely with the AI. This is crucial, as it plays a big part in following user experience and privacy expectations and norms. As the session data is not stored, it cannot be misused by either side in terms of marketing, profiling, or targeting ads. Reports have shown that many data breaches in major companies, storing lots of user info, which led to information leaks of dozens and even hundreds of millions of users.
The severity of privacy invasion may vary, but some of it can lead to pretty hostile work and personal relations being uncovered. This is why a lot of countries like European Union and other countries have made serious efforts to develop data protection laws like General Data Protection Regulation and similar, which all mention the data minimization principle, including the “right to be forgotten” idea. Both of these are vital for ensuring the data is handled safely, and the data they don’t need is not kept in the first place.
No Location Tracking
First things first, Character AI cannot and does not track your physical location, which is a pivotal privacy feature. Nowadays, there are numerous digital services that benefit from tracking your location. If you use Google Maps, FourSquare, or even Snapchat, your location is constantly tracked and often stored. This data may be used to provide you with traffic updates, local weather, or recommendations to nearby restaurants or service centers. Yet, with Character AI, there is no such necessity.
In fact, we know that location is a sensitive topic and offers a prime opportunity for privacy breaches. If, in the course of the conversation you mention a local event, the chatbot has been designed to explore such topics without acknowledging your place of residence. It is important to note that there are plenty of wonton location-demanding apps on your phone, such as certain games or social media services. They ask you to turn your GPS on to enhance the gaming experience or to look for friends in your area. These apps track your location constantly, savings it on their servers.
As we have seen in the previous months, data breaches are not uncommon at the moment. Notably, some of the most controversial breaches of confidence in the tech industry have pertained to location data. From this point of view, it is safe to say that constant a lack of tracking your location carries a lot of advantages. The first advantage is privacy. For some people, keeping their location private may be a matter of life and death, especially today, with so many political protests happening around the world. If you are a journalist, an activist, or someone’s ex-husband in a worst-case scenario, Character AI assured your safety from being stalked by your peers.
Data Isolation
CharacterAI follows a strict data isolation principle and treats each interaction individually. This is a large departure from the operation of many social media platforms and other online services that form a more comprehensive profile of each user from the data gathered to provide targeted advertising or other relevant information or services. Essentially, this means that if you bring up your hobbies in one of the sessions and your traveling preferences in another, CharacterAI will not connect the two and draw a more complete picture of your interests. The data isolation also means that the model does not see any data about previous interactions, along with all the data gathered having no other potential use.
This process can be contrasted with how most e-commerce websites with search engines operate. Your searches for books to read and electronic goods to buy will both be treated separately, allowing them to be more efficiently targeted at you. In this way, data isolation ensures that there are no unintended consequences or connections between individual data points. This also leads to higher levels of privacy — at this point, many users have shared their experiences with discussing their medical condition or symptoms with a health advice website only for related ads to show up everywhere, even in the physical world. CharacterAI does not make these inappropriate connections and leaves data divided. Data isolation benefits professionals such as legal or healthcare professionals as well — if they consult the model about their client’s problem, the provided advice will not reach the client, affecting the future relationship.
In addition to the legal requirements set forth by the GDPR legislation, data isolation aligns the service with many high-level principles on data use. For example, the model does not keep more data than it needs to operate, and most data are also not seen. This makes it easy for CharacterAI to operate in most secure environments that enforce high levels of privacy, such as the healthcare sector. Even the previous data supplied to customer service for quality improvements are not stored.
Lack of External Integration
The way Character AI is designed, it does not integrate externally with any databases or online platforms. The primary benefit of this is the fact that the processing model of compromising user privacy through data from other services and platforms or giving data to other services and platforms is impossible. For example, most digital assistants integrate with your calendar or email. If you have an assistant in your email, it can remind you to take particular gear with you when you go on a trip, or tell you that you have a meeting tomorrow. This information does, however, have to be compromised in an unethical manner because the assistant scans all your email.
This is something that Character AI cannot do, and, in fact, can never do. Not only that, but data from your discussions cannot be linked to a calendar, an email account, or a social media profile to ensure the most responsive user interactions based on the combined data. As a result, users that may or may not be cautious will feel equipped to share their information with the AI in ways that facilitate a useful discussion. Users who can be paranoid about their digital footprint will have the confidence that the data remains siloed and not shared with any other services.
In conclusion, the most attractive feature of Character AI is the fact that it is not integrated and simply cannot be integrated with any other services. This means that even if one were to take the most critical of the lens to the privacy policy of Myra, the privacy policy is in and of itself correct. There is no data that could or will be accumulated to sell you products or predict your behavior, and no data you share that could or will be surrendered to a party or used for a different purpose. All of Character AI’s promises are strictly kept in its own regard, and for a select range of purposes.