The VPN company has compiled an AI chatbot privacy rating based on the data collection practices of the 10 most popular AI chatbots on the App Store.
iPhone chatbots are ranked from worst to best, and there are no prizes for guessing which of the competing apps collects the most personal data…
Because Apple requires developers to list the personal data they collect, Surfshark was able to use this information to create rankings (shown below). To complement this, we also took a closer look at some of our privacy policies.
We checked the Apple App Store for privacy details and a list of the 10 most AI chatbots identified to date. […] The comparison was based on the number of types of data each app collects. We also reviewed the privacy policies of DeepSeek and ChatGPT to better understand what kind of data is kept on their servers and for how long.
The company found that AI chatbots collect, on average, 14 types of personal data.
All analyzed AI chatbot apps collect some form of user data. The average number of data types collected is 14 out of 35 possible. As many as 70% of apps collect your location information.
Unsurprisingly, the meta-AI was the worst offender.
Meta AI still collects the most user data among the analyzed apps, collecting 33 out of 35 types of data (nearly 95% of the total). Remains the only app that collects data across financial information categories. Similar to Google Gemini, Meta AI also collects sensitive information such as racial or ethnic data, sexual orientation, pregnancy or childbirth information, disability, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, political opinions, genetic information, and biometric data.
It probably won’t surprise you that Google was the next choice for the Gemini chatbot.
Google Gemini collects 23 unique data types. This includes precise location data collected only by Gemini, Meta AI, Copilot, and Perplexity. Gemini also collects a large amount of data across various other categories, such as contact information (name, email address, phone number, etc.), user content, contacts, search history, browsing history, and several other types of data.
Here are the complete rankings:
9to5Mac’s opinion
As Steve Jobs famously said, when you’re using a free service, you’re the product, not the customer. However, in this case, upgrading to a paid plan will not reduce the data collected.
Many AI chatbots use your questions as training data for their models, so you should always assume that your interactions are not private. The more data that is collected, the more likely it is that a chat session will be associated with you as an individual.
The safest way to use a chatbot is to use Siri fallback to ChatGPT. That’s because the iPhone maker has negotiated contracts that don’t allow queries to be anonymized and used as training data. Once the new Siri starts using Google’s Gemini, we expect to see exactly the same deal.
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
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