Siri Keeps Health Data Private While ChatGPT and Grok Don’t
What You Need to Know
- Many AI platforms collect health conversations by default and share data with third parties.
- Senator Warren and Representative Scanlon plan legislation prohibiting AI companies from selling user health data to brokers.
- Major tech companies actively encourage users to share medical information through new health features in chatbots.
- Apple’s Siri does not collect or sell personal health data, unlike general-purpose chatbots.
People who ask chatbots about symptoms or upload lab results for a quick read are doing something that feels private but often is not. Many AI platforms collect those conversations by default and their terms of service allow sharing that data with third parties. Two lawmakers are now moving to close that gap before the habit becomes harder to reverse.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Mary Gay Scanlon plan to introduce an updated version of the Health and Location Data Protection Act, this time with language that specifically targets AI companies. The bill would prohibit these platforms from passing user chats and uploaded files to data brokers. The timing is deliberate: the legislation arrives as major tech companies are actively pulling users toward sharing more medical information, not less.
Earlier this year, Elon Musk invited users to send MRI scans to his Grok tool. Around the same time, OpenAI launched a dedicated health feature inside ChatGPT and Anthropic introduced a comparable option for Claude. Each of these moves expands the surface area of what users might willingly hand over.
What Apple’s approach looks like by comparison
Experts already caution against relying on general-purpose chatbots for medical questions, partly because the answers are often wrong and partly because of what happens to the input afterward. Apple’s Siri sits outside that criticism on the data-collection front: the assistant does not collect or sell personal user data, which matters if you are already thinking about how to secure your Apple ID and keep personal information from spreading further than intended. Still, privacy researchers are pushing for a broad federal law rather than relying on individual companies to self-regulate.
The proposed legislation would not require users to change anything. It would shift the obligation onto the platforms themselves. Whether it advances further than previous versions of the bill is the open question, and the source of whatever cautious optimism surrounds it.
0 Comments