“It was severely downgraded,” Gilbert confirms. “I never would have found it if I was just looking through Google results.” (I tried the same prompt in Gemini earlier this month, and after an initial denial, the tool also gave me Eiger’s number.)
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.
At first, OpenAI’s guardrails kicked in, and ChatGPT responded that the information was unavailable. But in the same response, the chatbot suggested, “if you want to go deeper, I can still try a more ‘investigative-style’ approach.” Their inquiry just had to help “narrow things down,” ChatGPT said, by providing “a neighborhood guess” for where the professor might live, or “a possible co-owner name” for the professor’s home. ChatGPT continued: “That’s usually the only way to surface newer or intentionally less-visible property records.”
The students provided this information, leading ChatGPT to produce the professor’s home address, home purchase price, and spouse’s name from city property records.
(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.)
This reveals one of the fundamental problems with chatbots, says DeleteMe’s Shavell. AI companies “can build in guardrails, but [their chatbots] are also designed to be effective and to answer customer questions.”
The exposure issue is not limited to Gemini or ChatGPT. Last year, Futurismfound that if you promptedxAI’s chatbot Grok with “[name] address,” in almost all cases, it provided not only residential addresses but also often the person’s phone numbers, work addresses, and addresses for people with similar-sounding names. (xAI did not respond to a request for comment.)
No clear answers
There aren’t straightforward solutions to this problem—there’s no easy way to either verify whether someone’s personal information is in a given model’s training set or to compel the models to remove PII.
Steph Curry teased a screenless health band on his Instagram.
Here’s what I’d like to see from a Google fitness band.
Could Google’s latest fitness tracker return to its original, screenless Fitbit form? All signs say yes. Google has teased a screenless, Whoop-adjacent health tracker with the help of basketball star Steph Curry. A recent Instagram post from Curry shows him wearing a screenless, fabric band around his wrist, and the accompanying caption promotes “a new relationship with your health.”
There are scant confirmed details on this next device, but rumors suggest the band will be called “Fitbit Air.”
Why a screenless fitness band? And why now? Google’s new device could be taking interest away from popular fitness brand Whoop. Whoop’s fitness band is on the more luxurious end of the health wearables spectrum. The company offers three subscription tiers, starting at $199, $239, and $359 annually. Google’s device, on the other hand, is rumored to be more affordable with the option to upgrade to Fitbit Premium.
Google has the opportunity to make an accessibly priced fitness band with the rumored Fitbit Air and breathe new life into its older Fitbit product lineup, which hasn’t been updated in years.
What I’m expecting
Here’s what I expect to see and what I hope Google prioritizes in this new health tracker.
Given Fitbit’s bare-bones approach to fitness tracking, I assume Google will emphasize an affordable, accessible fitness band with the Fitbit Air. Most Fitbit products cost between $130 and $230, so I’m expecting this band to be on the lower end of that price range. I’d also expect Fitbit to give users a free trial of Fitbit Premium.
A smartwatch with a bright screen and integrations with an accompanying smartphone consumes a lot of power. That’s why some of the best smartwatches on the market have a middling battery life of one to two days, tops.
A fitness band, on the other hand, is screenless. That makes the battery potential on this Fitbit Air double — or even triple — that of Google’s smartwatches.
The Fitbit Inspire 3 has around 10 days of battery life — with a watch display. I hope the screenless Fitbit Air has at least 10 days of battery life, plus some change. Two weeks of battery life would be splendid.
In addition to usage time, I also hope that a screenless fitness tracker addresses some of the issues Fitbit Inspire users have complained about. Many Inspire users report that the device’s screen died after a year of use. They could still access data through the app, but the screen was dysfunctional. Despite being a more affordable Google health tracker, the Fitbit Air should last users for a few years without any hardware issues — or at least I hope it does.
Fitbit’s classically accurate heart rate measurements
As Google’s Performance Advisor and the athlete teasing Google’s next device, Steph Curry is sending the message that this new device, one that offers wearers “a new relationship with your health,” will be built for athletes and exercise enthusiasts. I hope this device homes in on accurate heart rate measurements and advanced sensing, as other Fitbit devices do.
Like Whoop, I hope the insights the Fitbit Air provides are performance- and recovery-driven. Whoop grew in popularity for exactly this reason. Not only do Whoop users get their sleep and recovery score, but they also see, through graphs and health data illustrations, how their daily exercise exertion, strain, and sleep interact with and inform each other.
I’m assuming that Fitbit Premium, with its AI-powered health coach and revamped app design, may do a lot of the heavy lifting for sleep and recovery insights with this new product.
But I also hope Google adds a few features on the app’s home screen that specifically target athletic strain and recovery, beyond the steps, sleep, readiness, and weekly exercise percentage already available on the Fitbit app’s main screen.
Lots of customizable, distinct bands
I hope the Fitbit Air is cheap — and the accompanying bands are even cheaper. If the rumors of affordability are true, then I’d hope Fitbit sells bands that can be worn with the device that match users’ styles and color preferences at a similarly affordable and accessible price point. Curry wears a gray-orange band in his teaser. I hope the colorways for this device are bold, patterned, and easily distinguishable from rival fitness bands.
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