A VPN company has put together AI chatbot privacy ratings based on the data collection practices of the ten most popular AI chatbots in the App Store.
The iPhone chatbots are ranked worst to best, and there are no prizes for guessing which of the competing apps collects the most personal data …
Since Apple requires developers to list the personal data they collect, Surfshark was able to use this information to compile its ranking – shown below. It supplemented this by taking a closer look at some of the privacy policies also.
We reviewed the privacy details on the Apple App Store for a list of previously identified 10 most AI chatbots […] The comparison was based on the number of data types each app collects. We also checked the privacy policies of DeepSeek and ChatGPT to better understand what kind of data is kept on servers and for how long.
The company found that, on average, AI chatbots collected 14 types of personal data.
All analyzed AI chatbot apps collect some form of user data. The average number of collected data types is 14 out of a possible 35. As much as 70% of the apps collect users’ locations.
Unsurprisingly, Meta AI was the worst offender.
Meta AI still collects the most user data among the analyzed apps, gathering 33 out of 35 possible data types — nearly 95% of the total. It remains the only app that collects data across the financial information category. Meta AI, alongside Google Gemini, also collects sensitive information, which includes racial or ethnic data, sexual orientation, pregnancy or childbirth information, disability, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, political opinion, genetic information, or biometric data.
We probably also shouldn’t be surprised that Google was next in line for its Gemini chatbot.
Google Gemini collects 23 unique data types. This includes precise location data, which only Gemini, Meta AI, Copilot, and Perplexity collect. Gemini also collects a significant amount of data across various other categories, such as contact info (name, email address, phone number, etc.), user content, contacts, search history, browsing history, and several other types of data.
Here are the complete rankings:
9to5Mac’s Take
As Steve Jobs famously said, if you are using a free service, then you’re the product, not the customer. But in this case, upgrading to any of the paid plans doesn’t result in any less data being collected.
Many AI chatbots use your questions as training data for their models, so you should always assume that your interactions are not private. The more data that is collected, the greater the chances that your chat sessions can be tied to you as an individual.
The safest way to use a chatbot is via the Siri fallback to ChatGPT since the iPhone maker has negotiated a contract where your queries are anonymized and not allowed to be used as training data. We’d expect exactly the same deal to be in place once the new Siri starts using Google’s Gemini.
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
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