Is Character AI Safe? Artificial Intelligence and Privacy – Issues and Challenges
Since the technological “birth” of Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT, many people are wondering what on earth they would do without AI in their lives. Since July 2024 ChatGPT has had 200 million weekly active users worldwide and attracted nearly 2.5 billion site visitors.
However, ChatGPT is not the only AI out there. Despite dominating the market, alongside Google’s Gemini AI, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, there are other AI models out there that people are checking out, one of which is Character AI.
If you’re looking to explore other options for your AI needs, such as language learning, story making, technology projects, or Role-Playing with famous characters, Character AI is one of many options out there.
Before you go exploring the wonderful possibilities of AI, read this article to find out is Character AI safe to use? Does it protect your privacy? What are other Character AI alternatives to consider?
Table of contents
- Data Character AI collects about you
- Shared data with others
- Control over your data: retention, security, and transfer
What is Character AI?
Character AI is a chatbot web app with neutral language models that replicate celebrities, historical figures, etc., and users can interact with them as they please. There are hundreds of options available, and you can even create your own AI character that is fully customizable.
Daniel De Freitas created the LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), one of the most popular language models used in AI. Alongside Noam Shazeer, De Freitas created Character AI.
Character AI is an AI chatbot web application that utilizes neutral language models to generate text responses. Unlike traditional chatbots, Character AI employs neutral language models, enabling users to engage in dialogue with fictional, historical, and even celebrity figures.
Character AI is a popular alternative to ChatGPT. It allows users to make their own chatbots that can imitate specific people, celebrities, professionals, and more. You can even use it to practice a new language, play games, fix bugs in your code, or as your own personal fitness coach.
Similar to most popular popular AI platforms out there, one of many reasons people are concerned about the platform is that AI needs to collect and use vast amounts of data to learn and improve over time, to create the best experience for Character’s AI user base.
Is Character AI safe?
As mentioned before, Character AI and other language models need data collection to continue learning and adapting to the people who use these platforms. Data collection is always risky, as it can be breached, leaked online, or used in identity theft or other cybercrimes.
Whether or not Character AI is safe or not will depend on how they use your data, so we will take a look at that to help us make a decision.
To fully understand whether Character AI is safe to use, it's best to check out their privacy policy, which we have summarized and taken the most important information from so you can determine whether you should use this platform or not.
It’s important to note that when you sign up for Character AI, it uses SSL encryption to protect your data as it travels online, but like many online platforms, security ≠ privacy.
Character AI privacy: What you need to know
To fully understand whether Character AI is safe to use, it's best to check out their privacy policy. We have summarized and taken the most important information from so you can determine whether you should use this platform or not.
Data Character AI collects about you
According to the Character AI privacy policy, it collects the following data about you:
- Personal information like email address, username, and payment information.
- User content like chat communications and characters you create.
- Information collected automatically through cookies and similar tracking technologies, including browsing history, IP address, and device identifiers.
- Information from third-party sources like social media platforms.
Your email, address, and IP address are all important parts of your online identity. If these were to leak, it could lead to doxing, hacked accounts, and financial harm. The risk of this increases if Character AI shares data with others, which it does.
Shared data with others
Here is the data Character AI shares with others:
- Affiliates and vendors to operate the services.
- Third-party analytics and advertising partners (they say they do not currently do this).
- Law enforcement or legal process if necessary.
- In the case of business transfers.
- When you use group chats or create public characters, other users can see your content.
- With your consent, they may also share your information with other third parties.
As we can see, your data is not just stored with Character AI; others can use this data to collect information about you.
It is also unclear how your data will be used in the future, Character AI says
"Though we do not engage in advertising as of the date of this Policy, we may in the future disclose or make available some of your information with advertising and analytics partners to serve advertisements on our behalf across the internet and to provide analytics services.”
Therefore, if you decide to use Character AI, ensure you stay updated with this policy so you have the information required to stay knowledgeable about how your data is handled.
Other platform members can also view your conversations in private chats, so exercise extreme caution if you use these chats, so never share any personal information here.
Control over your data: retention, security, and transfer
Controlling your data on Character AI can be difficult, and although there are ways to unsubscribe to marketing emails, it is unclear how you can delete your data from the platform or opt out of data sharing.
Even if you delete your account, there’s an unspecified period of time that Character AI keeps this information, so you are still not safe from data breaches when you close your account.
Does Character AI save and view my chats?
Yes, Character AI will save and view your chats. As defined in their Privacy Policy,
Data from your: “chat communications, posted images, and shared Characters” are all part of the Character AI views.
Theoretically, other users won’t be able to view your private chats, but Character AI employees use data to train and improve their language models, so there’s a high chance they can view your chats or save them for future AI training.
From their website, Character AI say:
“[...] public characters and shared conversations are visible to the community. Always review the privacy settings to control the visibility of your interactions.”
So, is your Character AI account safe? Not really. Is there a way to make your online accounts secure? Again, unfortunately, not really.
How to use Character AI securely
It’s hard to trust a company that collects so much of your data and shares it with others. On top of that, the fact that it is difficult to delete this data from the platform completely suggests that Character AI is not the safest platform to use.
Another major concern is how your chats are used. Not much information is available online about how your chats are encrypted, so it suggests that Character AI will use these chats to improve the platform and learn from your interactions with the bots.
Character AI security settings
With so many privacy issues surrounding Character AI, you would think it would go above and beyond for account security, at least. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
You can create an account via your email, from there you need to click a link to verify your identity and open your account. The main problem with Character AI’s security is the lack of further protection for your account.
You cannot enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) from your account settings, change or set up your password, or edit your personal information.
Therefore, in theory, if someone has accessed your email, they can access your Character AI account with the link they send and view your chat history for any private or sensitive information they could use against you.
There also doesn’t seem to be a lot you can do to hide your profile, so you would need to make your username and bio discreet to keep your account as anonymous as possible.
Cybersecurity tools
If you just want to see what the hype surrounding Character AI is, or you want to play around with the different options available, then there are some things you can do to make this a more secure and private experience.
- Use a temporary email to keep your own email protected and safe from being shared with external companies.
- Use Internxt's free vpn to encrypt your connection and hide your IP address, keeping it safe from hackers and third-party access.
- Keep your personal information off the platform; don’t share real names, locations, emails, or anything that can be linked to you.
Character AI alternatives
Finding a completely private AI model will be a challenge. Try to find open-source models or a provider that is starting to use AI with its own suite of privacy products, such as Brave.
Depending on what you use Character AI for, you can find other alternatives for language learning that don’t violate your privacy so much.
Right now, the best we can do regarding AI and privacy is wait for Apple Intelligence, which Apple announced earlier in 2024. Apple says its AI will focus on privacy, saying in a Keynote that it doesn’t train its models with private data or user interactions. Many requests will be kept locally on the user’s device, and more complex ones will be taken from external cloud servers.
One final option is to host and download your own private GPT. This is complex to set up, but the models are pre-trained and hosted locally on your machine, keeping any information away from the internet.
With any AI provider, consider what information you give it beforehand, as it is trained on this data, and any personal information could fall into the wrong hands at any time, so be careful.