California residents have stronger legally enforceable privacy rights than users in most other US states, including the right to opt out of OpenAI sharing their data with third parties for cross-context behavioral advertising.
OpenAI collects extensive personal data including conversation content, audio and image inputs, device identifiers, location data, and usage logs across all its services, and may use this data to train AI models unless users opt out. This creates a meaningful privacy risk because sensitive information shared in conversations — health queries, financial details, personal communications — could indirectly influence model outputs. You can opt out of conversation data being used for AI training by navigating to Settings > Data Controls in your ChatGPT account and disabling 'Improve the model for everyone'.