So whats the issue here? Ohh no my private documents are in plain text on my private computer fucking morons.

There really wasn’t an expectation of privacy with this. This is not a surprise.

Microsoft's much-heralded Notepad.exe was storing files as plain text

Same level of security concern. Quit putting your sensitive data into apps that aren't meant for it.

Microsoft's much-heralded Word app was storing documents as unencrypted DOCX files leaving them viewable by any malware.

So many apps use sqlite or json files for storage without encryption; this doesn't seem like much of a discovery.

In any case, don't share PII or any of your deepest, darkest secrets with it.

I store almost everyfuck in plain text, so what?

Oh, somebody wants to use techbro stuff and expect security.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

OpenAI announced its Mac desktop app for ChatGPT with a lot of fanfare a few weeks ago, but it turns out it had a rather serious security issue: user chats were stored in plain text, where any bad actor could find them if they gained access to your machine.

As Threads user Pedro José Pereira Vieito noted earlier this week, "the OpenAI ChatGPT app on macOS is not sandboxed and stores all the conversations in plain-text in a non-protected location," meaning "any other running app / process / malware can read all your ChatGPT conversations without any permission prompt."

OpenAI chose to opt-out of the sandbox and store the conversations in plain text in a non-protected location, disabling all of these built-in defenses.

OpenAI has now updated the app, and the local chats are now encrypted, though they are still not sandboxed.

It's not a great look for OpenAI, which recently entered into a partnership with Apple to offer chat bot services built into Siri queries in Apple operating systems.

Apple detailed some of the security around those queries at WWDC last month, though, and they're more stringent than what OpenAI did (or to be more precise, didn't do) with its Mac app, which is a separate initiative from the partnership.

The original article contains 291 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 27%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!