<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was severely downgraded,\u201d Gilbert confirms. \u201cI never would have found it if I was just looking through Google results.\u201d (I tried the same prompt in Gemini earlier this month, and after an initial denial, the tool also gave me Eiger\u2019s number.)<\/p>\n
After this experience, Eiger, Gilbert, and another UW PhD student, Anna-Maria Gueorguieva, decided to test ChatGPT to see what it would surface about a professor.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At first, OpenAI\u2019s guardrails kicked in, and ChatGPT responded that the information was unavailable. But in the same response, the chatbot suggested, \u201cif you want to go deeper, I can still try a more \u2018investigative-style\u2019 approach.\u201d Their inquiry just had to help \u201cnarrow things down,\u201d ChatGPT said, by providing \u201ca neighborhood guess\u201d for where the professor might live, or \u201ca possible co-owner name\u201d for the professor\u2019s home. ChatGPT continued: \u201cThat\u2019s usually the only way to surface newer or intentionally less-visible property records.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The students provided this information, leading ChatGPT to produce the professor\u2019s home address, home purchase price, and spouse\u2019s name from city property records.\u00a0<\/p>\n
(Taya Christianson, an OpenAI representative, said she was not able to comment on what happened in this case without seeing screenshots or knowing which model the students had tested, even after we pointed out that many users may not know which model they were using in the ChatGPT interface. She also declined to comment generally about the exposure of PII by the chatbot, instead providing links to documents describing how OpenAI handles privacy, including filtering out PII, and other tools.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
This reveals one of the fundamental problems with chatbots, says DeleteMe\u2019s Shavell. AI companies \u201ccan build in guardrails, but [their chatbots] are also designed to be effective and to answer customer questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The exposure issue is not limited to Gemini or ChatGPT. Last year, Futurism<\/em> found that if you prompted <\/em>xAI\u2019s chatbot Grok with \u201c[name] address,\u201d in almost all cases, it provided not only residential addresses but also often the person\u2019s phone numbers, work addresses, and addresses for people with similar-sounding names. (xAI did not respond to a request for comment.)\u00a0<\/p>\n There aren\u2019t straightforward solutions to this problem\u2014there\u2019s no easy way to either verify whether someone\u2019s personal information is in a given model\u2019s training set or to compel the models to remove PII.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #chatbots #giving #peoples #real #phone #numbers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIt was severely downgraded,\u201d Gilbert confirms. \u201cI never would have found it if I was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[3249,2286,1937,8342,1337,490],"class_list":["post-10100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-chatbots","tag-giving","tag-numbers","tag-peoples","tag-phone","tag-real"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260507_callbots.jpg",1200,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260507_callbots-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260507_callbots-300x150.jpg",300,150,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260507_callbots-768x384.jpg",640,320,true],"large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260507_callbots-1024x512.jpg",640,320,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260507_callbots.jpg",1200,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260507_callbots.jpg",1200,600,false],"covernews-featured":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260507_callbots-1024x512.jpg",1024,512,true],"covernews-medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260507_callbots-540x340.jpg",540,340,true]},"author_info":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?author=1"},"category_info":"Stories<\/a>","tag_info":"Stories","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}No clear answers<\/h3>\n