BeginnerLesson 1 of 58 min read
Where does your message actually go?
A course from the Academy: Your data, and what becomes of it
Go to the quiz ↓Let's follow a message, from the Enter key to the response. Nothing mysterious, but few people picture it.
The journey
Your text leaves your device, encrypted during transit, and arrives on the servers of the company providing the service. There, it is decrypted to be processed: a model cannot work on encrypted text.
It is split into chunks, passed through the model, and the response goes back the same way. The whole thing takes one to two seconds.
What "encrypted" means here, and what it doesn't mean
Encryption protects your message during transit, against someone eavesdropping on the network. This is not end-to-end encryption like in a private messaging app: the provider sees the content in plain text. It has to, since it's the one processing it.
How long it's kept
That depends on the service and your settings, but the order of magnitude is a few weeks to a few months for technical logs, and until you delete them for your conversations themselves.
Some of it is also kept for moderation: detecting prohibited uses requires being able to look. Humans can therefore, within that framework, read excerpts.
What to take away from this
This is neither a scandal nor a trap: it's how an online service normally works. But it makes concrete what's often repeated: writing to an AI is not like writing in a notebook.
Complete the lesson
A 4-question quiz: 3 correct answers are enough, plus an exercise to practise. It opens in the Academy, on this same lesson.
Take the quiz and complete the lesson Free. With an account, your progress is saved and leads to the course certificate.The course: Your data, and what becomes of it
- Where does your message actually go?8 min
- What "being used for training" actually means8 min
- The settings that actually exist7 min
- At work: the question that really matters7 min
- Your rights, in Europe7 min