AI chatbot tracking study

Infographic of the paper “Prompt like a Butterfly, sting like a tracker”

 

 

This post in Spanish.

 

ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Le Chat de Mistral and Meta AI filter your data to Google, Meta, and several of the main data brokers.

It makes little difference if you do not accept cookies.

It does not matter whether you pay or not.

It does not matter if you use Brave and ad blockers. TikTok receives screenshots of your chats in Grok.

The experts at IMDEA Networks have demonstrated this in a study on ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Le Chat de Mistral and Meta AI with a browser and a very special phone that allows them to study and document the information that leaves your browser and your Android mobile apps, and where it goes.

The resulting paper is “Prompt like a Butterfly, Sting like a Tracker“, led by Narseo Vallina-Rodríguez and his team, in which I participated as a lawyer, has been accepted in PoPETs 2027, the leading academic forum on privacy technologies, with peer review.

Link to the paper.

Link to the complete analysis of why this is different from any other privacy infringement.

What follows is a visual summary of the paper generated with Claude Design: I have reviewed it, but in case of discrepancy, the paper prevails over the summary. Obviously.