What LLMs Know About Their Users
28 comments
·June 25, 2025wcarss
tveita
Or the post it quotes https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/chatgpt-new-memory/
jazzyjackson
"6": "User is active 2 days in the last 1 day, 8 days in the last 7 days, and 11 days in the last 30 days."
HPsquared
I suppose the last 24 hours contains today and yesterday.
Jensson
Is that how you work 200%?
vavooom
I applied this query with 4o and yes, quite a thorough historical recounting. Really weaves together all those "random" questions one asks an LLM into a surprisingly (and somewhat scary) encompassing of one's self.
marcusstorm
This is like the prompts which ask the LLM to act as a spy / FBI agent, to expose what it knows about the user, right?
null
rcruzeiro
Isn’t this just outputting the same information that you can find on my “administre memories” section of ChatGPT settings?
BurningFrog
FWIW, Grok answers this when asked "what do you know about me?" (I do have an account):
I don’t have any personal information about you, as I don’t have access to user data unless it’s explicitly shared in the conversation. If you’ve posted publicly on X, I could potentially look up your profile or posts to learn more, but I’d need your X handle to do that. Alternatively, if you want to share something about yourself—like your interests, location, or what you’re curious about—I can tailor my responses based on that. What would you like me to know or explore about you?
simianwords
LLM's knowing things about us is genuinely useful - what's the alternative here?
GMoromisato
I don’t care what chatGPT knows about me. But I do care what OpenAI knows about me and how it will use that knowledge.
The alternative is transparency and verification of who has that data.
Diti
The alternative is that LLMs don’t know anything about us, of course. That’s what Kagi’s Assistants do.
hardlianotion
I still don't know what integrous means.
sydney6
"Integrous" is a rarely used adjective meaning "having or characterized by integrity". It's derived from the Latin word "integer," meaning whole or complete, and the suffix "-ous" indicating fullness or possession. While technically correct, it's more common to use synonyms like "honest," "decent," or "virtuous" to convey the concept of integrity.
Now, take a guess where this comes from..
bgwalter
> User’s account is 237 weeks old.
ChatGPT was released to the public on November 30, 2022.
Otherwise, this reads like an FBI file:
simonw
I created an account with OpenAI back in 2020 to try out GPT-3, which would explain that account age.
(I just confirmed that by searching my email for anything mentioning OpenAI in 2020 and found an invite to create an account in October 2020.)
jruohonen
Same old but there has been surprisingly little attention paid to it in the present context.
nullc
People's privacy expactations are miscalculated in a world with LLMs. Before LLMs there was little reason to care if you were leaving breadcrumbs, because no one with access was going to investigate them and draw conclusions from them.
The fact that the LLMs are prone to hallucinations and fanciful conclusion jumping probably make things worse, because the only way to be safe from it wrongfully concluding things about you is to just be invisible to it.
holri
I just asked Mistral.ai, using it without an account:
what do you know about me? 2:50pm
I don't know anything about you unless you share information with me. How can I assist you today? 2:50pm you do not know my IP and its location? 2:50pm
That's correct, I don't have access to your IP address or your location. If you need assistance with something specific, feel free to let me know!
noident
You might as well have asked the pen on your desk how much it knows about you. Whether your personal data is in the current LLM context window or not has nothing to do with whether it was collected from you by Mistral.
amelius
Of course that doesn't prove much. Perhaps the information is only available to administrators.
BoiledCabbage
Not to complain, but that test would be more interesting if you ran it with an account.
wongarsu
Rather than ask it if it knows anything about you, ask it where the nearest McDonalds is
Mistral seems honest in its assessment (as should be expected from a French company operating under GDPR). But e.g. ChatGPT will deny knowing your location, but still show a McDonalds that suggests it knows your IP geolocation
holri
where is the nearest McDonald's? 18:51
I'm sorry, but I don't have the capability to access real-time location data to find the nearest McDonald's for you. However, you can easily find this information by using a maps application on your phone or computer.
EGreg
When I speak to ChatGPT and other LLMs, I am mindful of the profile they build on me and what I ask about. And even how I ask it.
It is the same as I have been doing for 15 years on public social media.
The link should probably be: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/what-llms-kno...