Private AI, a Toronto-based data privacy software developer, has launched PrivateGPT, an artificial intelligence-powered tool that helps companies safely use OpenAI’s chatbot without compromising customer or employee privacy. PrivateGPT redacts over 50 types of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) prompts before sending them to ChatGPT, which the tool then repopulates in the answer for a seamless and secure user experience. The company has stated that entities can be toggled on or off to provide ChatGPT with the context it needs to successfully answer queries, or privacy mode can be turned off entirely if no sensitive information needs to be filtered out.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires companies to obtain consent for all uses of their users’ personal data and to comply with requests to be forgotten. By sharing personal information with third-party organizations, they lose control over how that data is stored and used, putting themselves at serious risk of compliance violations. The recent major privacy breach that took place at OpenAI on March 20 of this year, causing the company to take ChatGPT temporarily offline, serves as an example of what can go wrong.
Private AI’s co-founder and CEO, Patricia Thaine, highlighted that LLMs, including ChatGPT, are not excluded from data protection laws such as Canada’s Privacy Protection Act and GDPR. She emphasized the importance of data minimization and the best practice of limiting risk and exposure by minimizing the amount of personal data shared.
PrivateGPT is the result of the company’s development efforts, which started in mid-March of this year after it became clear that most organizations’ reaction was to block ChatGPT. While the company declined to release pricing information, they have disclosed that they are actively working with a number of large corporations in North America and Europe on commercial deals. Additionally, Private AI plans to extend the product to cover more than just ChatGPT and to cover other OpenAI services as well as additional organizations’ products.