Apple Users Beware: ChatGPT’s Newest Mac Feature Could Pose a Major Privacy Risk
OpenAI’s new iMessage integration is a massive time-saver for personal use, but granting the AI access to your contacts and data could be a nightmare for company security.
OpenAI keeps building on the capabilities of ChatGPT with the goal of making it a kind of “everything” app, and while some tweaks bring fascinating new tools to users, others bring novel security and privacy concerns. One new ChatGPT innovation falls in the latter category, since it may trigger business owners’ worries about data leaking out: ChatGPT can now control Apple’s Messages texting system on Macs.
OpenAI announced the feature in an X post that suggests that “Everyday conversations just got easier” thanks to the new plugin power, which lets you “Search messages, catch up on conversations, draft and send replies” using ChatGPT on Mac computers.
An accompanying video clip includes a handy example, where a user asks the chatbot to suggest if there are to-do items they need to catch up on from Messages. The AI works for a brief while, then reports it found an upcoming social event and even automatically drafts a suitable reply. The user then tweaks the reply, and clicks a “continue” button which commands the app to send the text via Messages just as if it were any normal human-crafted SMS. OpenAI also suggests other uses like “Check my calendar and reply to [name] with a few times I’m free for dinner next week,” and “Find birthdays in @ messages and add them to my calendar.”
As a frequent Messages user, it looks like a convenient and time-saving tool to deal with texts arriving to your personal inbox. Though it only works on Macs for now, Messages is an integrated Apple service that works across all your Apple devices—meaning these ChatGPT-s
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But Macs are very popular business tools. And while the cheerful use cases OpenAI suggests for the new Messages integration are clearly aimed at personal users, with a few tweaks it’s easy to imagine a host of business applications. Prompts like “find me a time for a client dinner with X company on Wednesday and message them please,” for example.
And it’s exactly at this point that privacy and security-conscious readers may begin to worry. To enable the new plugin, which is available in OpenAI’s business-centric ChatGPT Work app and its software-writing system Codex, users have to change certain privacy-related Mac settings, Bloomberg reports. This includes giving ChatGPT access to names and details of contacts stored on your Mac, as well as giving the app deeper access to parts of your computer like its disk storage.
Apple has defended and extended its reputation as being user privacy-centric for many years—even tussling with the FBI about unlocking a user’s iPhone—and it promises that in many cases it can’t even access user data saved on its servers. Allowing OpenAI’s powerful but controversial chatbot free reign to scan, analyze and send messages, and to access a user’s contact list should trigger questions about how safe that data is in OpenAI’s hands.
Source: www.inc.com
