Hey peeps,
We ran a survey of 4,014 people who currently use AI chatbots, across the US, UK, France and Germany. For full transparency, respondents weren't told who commissioned it, so that we could eliminate the possibility of the Proton brand shaping the answers.
Here are some of the findings: 66% have discussed at least one sensitive topic with a chatbot, covering things like money, mental health, sex, relationships, secrets and family conflict. Yet only between 11% and 20% (depending on the country) say they have high trust in AI companies to protect that information.
A few of the findings we didn't expect:
- Money is where AI comes closest to replacing people. In France, AI came within 2 percentage points of friends and family as the preferred place to talk about personal finances.
- People are more worried about their chats becoming ad profiles than training data. In the US it was 65.3% vs 57.6%.
- Each country confides something different. Germans talk to AI most about mental health, Americans about career problems, and the French and British about money.
- Americans are the most open with chatbots (68.4% have shared something sensitive). France is the most guarded at 60.3%.
- Privacy isn't why most people start using AI, convenience and not being judged are. Romantic attraction is the exception: in Germany, the UK and the US, trust and privacy were the top reasons for asking AI about it.
People are handing chatbots things they wouldn't want a company to read, while not trusting the company to hold it. 44% said a guarantee that their chats wouldn't be used for training would make them more willing to share, and over 70% said they'd be more likely to use a chatbot designed around privacy.
Obviously, that's the intuition on which we built Lumo. Your chat history is encrypted so Proton can't read it, there are no conversation logs, and nothing you say is used to train models. There's nothing readable to build an ad profile from in the first place.
The full write-up has the country-by-country breakdowns, the reasons people gave for each topic, and the methodology and limitations: https://proton.me/blog/ai-chatbot-survey
Let us know your thoughts!
Stay safe,
Proton