OpenAI has been expanding its advertising business, recently introducing visual promos in addition to text ads that get injected into ChatGPT conversations. But how does OpenAI choose what ads to display? The decision is more personal than you might think.
404 Media ran two advertising campaigns in ChatGPT and found it allows advertisers to target users based on personally linked accounts and information, including a person’s email address, phone number, or a unique identifier on their phone. Per the publication, when a prospective advertiser goes to select their preferred audience for an advertisement, they can upload a list of individual users with the aforementioned identifiers that have been gathered in any number of ways. OpenAI’s ad program checks to see if those accounts link to a ChatGPT user, and if they do, then they’re eligible to catch an ad.
Users can reportedly do this with raw emails and phone numbers, hashed or obscured versions of those same accounts, or with the unique advertising ID that has been assigned to every Android device. (Per OpenAI’s documentation, it does not show the advertiser when it hits on a matched account, so you can’t use the tool as a technique to find someone’s ChatGPT profile.)
Now, that doesn’t mean you can just enter a single email and force your message on one person over and over again. You can only create an audience this way if your list of targets is 25,000 entries long. Its practices around just how well it protects that user data seem suspect as well. Per 404 Media, it’s unclear if OpenAI hashes the raw user data that is uploaded to its platform, meaning that information theoretically could be sitting exposed—though the company does claim to delete all uploaded files within 24 hours of processing the data.
OpenAI maintains that including an account in an “audience” does not guarantee that it’ll get hit with a targeted ad, and users do have the ability to opt out of personalized advertising in their own settings. However, that doesn’t seem to guarantee that a user can’t be targeted by their unique identifier, as the setting only specifically excludes ads based on “your past chats, activity, and preferences to select ads.” Per OpenAI, “Ads may still be based on your current chat.”
Gizmodo reached out to OpenAI for additional details regarding how it allows advertisers to target users with ads, but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
