Tell HN: ChatGPT now "knows" your geolocation
Just a heads up: I use ChatGPT everyday, but until recently you had to mention your location in the conversation, if you needed it for context, or else it would assume the US.
Now I just asked a random question about exporting goods in a new chat, and it immediately started from the point of view of being located in my country.
I guess the parameter is passed to the model's REST API, as I see no pre-prompt, and I don't have Memory activated.
I'm pretty sure they are just using your IP address which I personally think is totally ok. I tested this by asking "What time is it?" and it responded "It's currently xx:xx at [location]", and the location in the response wasn't my exact location, but the location I'd get after putting my IP address in one of those IP-to-Location websites.
Every website has the ability to know which country you live in, likely which city, just using your IP address. Use a VPN if you're concerned.
I don’t have any knowledge of what they’re doing exactly and I’m on mobile but if you’re using ChatGPT and it’s not asking for location permissions, it’s probably getting your very rough location from a GeoIP database, or even more roughly, guessing from the passed language string (I.e: en-US).
I wouldn’t be too concerned. And not to be a jerk, but if this is something that concerns you, stop using their product entirely because they’re probably experimenting with way more invasive things like psychological analysis based on your queries.
And stop using the web at large, because they’re doing much creepier things and sharing it with everyone.
Edit: The OpenAI privacy policy says they can collect anything and everything about you and share it with third-parties unrestricted unless it’s unlawful.
https://openai.com/policies/row-privacy-policy/
Consider how much info cookies and user intent contain about each user via persistent session tracking.
I wonder if we will see ChatGPT include a behind the scenes giant JSON with 2-20k fields about the personal in the chat and have finetuned "personal situation" ChatGPTs (or just include it in the prompt).
We might find it abhorrent now, but like tracking, it might just come over time. First location, then interests, etc.