Hello folks,
Here are a few things I learned about OpenAI over the last couple of days.
The most important one is that, no matter what you do, they will not allow you to change your email. It doesn’t matter if you used Google to log in or created a normal email-password account. The only recommended option is to delete your account and create a new one.
So I went ahead with deleting my account. Account deletion happens through their OpenAI Privacy Portal
You have to make a privacy request here.
When I did that, I saw these options.
I stumbled upon the Do not train on my content option. Who knew it was hidden here?
I tried that and got this message.
The keyword here is “data that was previously disassociated from my account.” I don’t know exactly what that means, but it doesn’t feel right.
I tried this option and received an email confirming that my data will not be used for training from now on.
Then I tried the Download my Data option, and in a few minutes I received an email saying my data was ready for download.
Upon downloading, I could see that the total size was around 700MB, but the download stops at 200MB, and the ZIP file is always corrupted.
Then I tried downloading the data from the ChatGPT settings instead.
The download went fine, but the total size was around 80MB. It has all the images I uploaded and my chats, but the chats are not from day one.
Now I wonder what is in the 700MB file that keeps getting corrupted mid download. Could be my chats from day one.
Then I finally went for the delete my account option, and I am waiting for their confirmation email.
Some other things.
While we are on the subject, if ChatGPT keeps storing details about you, you can stop that from here.
ChatGPT also asks for persistent storage in the browser. I don’t know why they need this, but I’m sure it’s something most people don’t want. On Firefox, I can press Ctrl+I to turn this off forever.
If you want to chat with ChatGPT in temporary mode, bookmark this URL
These chats won’t be saved in your ChatGPT chat history.
There is no permanent temporary chat mode toggle button.
Overall, this whole process taught me that managing your data on these AI platforms isn’t always straightforward, and some options are harder to find than they should be.
Hopefully this helps others understand what to expect when dealing with your data on these AI platforms.
