LOCK IT UP! OpenAI started rolling out locked chats in ChatGPT on Tuesday, letting you pull sensitive conversations out of your regular history, pinned chats and search, and stash them behind a four-digit PIN, Fortune reported. On supported phones you can open them with Face ID, Touch ID or your phone’s unlock instead.
Locked conversations move to Projects > Locked chats. OpenAI pitches it for the moment someone is looking at your screen share or borrowing your device.
THE CATCH: forget the PIN and reset it, and you permanently delete every locked chat, plus any memories stored only inside them and files protected only by the old PIN. OpenAI says the deletion can’t be undone and its support team can’t recover anything. Workspace admins can’t reset your PIN either. Changing a PIN you still remember deletes nothing.
And read the fine print: locking a chat changes where it shows up, not how OpenAI handles it. It is not end-to-end encryption, it doesn’t change how long OpenAI keeps the chat or your “Improve the model for everyone” setting, and it doesn’t erase what ChatGPT already remembered. In Enterprise and Edu workspaces, locked chats still show up in compliance logs. If you want a chat kept out of history and memory, Temporary Chat is the tool for that.
Two more gotchas: locking a chat doesn’t kill an existing shared link, so delete that separately. And temporary, archived, group and shared-link chats can’t be locked at all. The feature is rolling out gradually to Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu plans.
Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.
Source: Fortune
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