If you value privacy and do not want your conversations to be stored on OpenAI’s servers, know how you can delete your chats.
ChatGPT lets you archive chats to de-clutter the active history
ChatGPT has emerged as an important tool for many. Some use it to learn about new topics and research, others to have idle conversations, and others still use its tools for productivity and work. No matter how you use the platform, there is a risk that you might have had conversations that are either sensitive in nature or contain information you do not want stored on OpenAI's servers due to privacy reasons. If you have also faced similar concerns, there are two ways for you to better manage your chats, keeping privacy in mind.
Chat history in ChatGPT refers to the list of conversations stored in the sidebar of the interface. Whenever you have a conversation with the chatbot, it creates a new session, which remains available in the history. It continues to be visible in the list unless it is manually deleted or archived. OpenAI says that these conversations are stored to maintain continuity between sessions and to improve services. Users can also go back to these conversations whenever they want and continue the chat with the older context.
However, this does not mean that users cannot manage individual conversations directly from the chat list. There are a few options a user can exercise to either delete a chat permanently, hide it from the list, or have it never be shown in the active history at all.
Understanding how these options work is useful for maintaining privacy and organising large numbers of conversations.
Deleting a chat permanently removes it from the chat list. Once a conversation is deleted, it cannot be restored from within the ChatGPT interface or via the application programming interface (API). To delete a chat from the website, just follow these steps given below:
The steps to delete a conversation from the mobile app are slightly different. Users who use the app primarily can follow the following steps instead:
Archiving chats works differently from deletion. Instead of removing the conversation entirely, archiving simply hides it from the main chat list. The chat remains stored in the account and can be accessed later through the archive section.
This feature is useful for users who want to keep conversations for reference without cluttering their main workspace. To archive a chat, just follow these steps on the website:
Just like deletion, archiving chat on the mobile app is also slightly different. Follow these steps:
Archived chats can later be restored to the main list if needed.
Apart from these, there is one other option to have conversations that never show up on the active history. Users can tap on the chat icon on any new chat page, located at the top-right corner. This activates temporary chats. These conversations are auto-deleted once the user starts a new chat or goes to an older chat. These also do not store any information, preferences, or memories about the user.
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