HK privacy watchdog vows to monitor data privacy risks related to ChapGPT

Hong Kong’s privacy watchdog has pledged to monitor the risk of personal data leaks imposed by generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as ChatGPT.

This comes after Italy became the first country in the West to ban ChatGPT. Garante, the Italian data protection watchdog, imposed an immediate temporary limitation on the processing of Italian users’ data by OpenAI. It cited a data breach at OpenAI which allowed users to view the titles of conversations other users were having with the chatbot.

Recently, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI disclosed a bug that allowed some ChatGPT users to view the titles of other users' conversation history. He stressed the problem had been fixed. 

Commenting on the potential risk of ChatGPT, Francis Fong, honorary president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, said ChatGPT cannot distinguish whether the data it is fed by users belongs to personal data.

“When companies ask ChatGPT on how to reply to a complaint letter from a specific customer, they may input that customer’s personal data such as telephone and address. Then if someone asks ChatGPT questions related to that specific customer, it will just pop out his or her personal information fed by the company before,” Fong said.

He added that as ChatGPT is a knowledge-based chatbot, and it fails to discern between correct and false information at this stage. Users should stop feeding confidential information such as personal data to these chatbots.

Adding to Fong’s views is Lierence Li, managing director of Market Hubs, who said that offline AI chatbots help solve the data privacy issue by generative AI chatbots.

“Offline AI chatbots don’t need all data to generate answers. Instead, they just need their own existing databases and can produce custom-made messages as well. Developers can update their database and train their data from time to time,” Li said. 

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE has reached out to PCPD for further information.

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Backed by Microsoft, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can generate human-like text in response to simple keywords put in by users. While it has not been officially available for use in Hong Kong, citizens can still access it with virtual private networks (VPN) or alternative apps. Meanwhile, many local universities have rolled out policies on whether students are allowed to use it in their work. Local universities including University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) have been stopping pupils from using artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT in their course work to tackle plagiarism issues.

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