September 7, 2026
AI Still Hasn't Learned to Keep Secrets
One in three people has told an AI chatbot a secret they never told anyone else. 53% did not know that training models on your conversations is industry standard.
One third of people who have ever talked to an AI chatbot told it a secret they never told anyone else. Not their doctor. Not their family.
The data comes from a study commissioned by DuckDuckGo with 1,944 adults in the United States. Parents and guardians with a child at home share secrets with chatbots at almost twice the rate: 43%, compared to 25% among those with no child at home. That makes sense: raising a child raises questions that are hard to confess, and so far chatbots do not give "that" judgmental look.
But 53% of respondents did not even know that training the model on their own conversations is industry standard, and only 25% knew that this history can become evidence in legal proceedings. They trusted because no one had told them otherwise. When they found out: 58% reported discomfort and 30% reported high discomfort.
Training is left on by default rather than requiring explicit consent, opt-out is buried in settings, free accounts carry looser retention policies than paid ones, and all of this is a decision made by whoever designed the product.
Whoever designs the product has an outcome in mind, whether facilitating, making difficult, or biasing the user's choice.
Sources: Tecnoblog · CyberInsider · 9to5Mac