Your rights, in Europe

The European data regulation applies to these services as soon as they target people in Europe. This gives you concrete, enforceable rights, yet very few people actually exercise them.

What you can request

Access. Obtain a copy of the data held about you. Most services offer an export button in the settings, which saves you from having to write in.

Rectification, if a piece of data about you is incorrect.

Erasure, the famous right to be forgotten. It covers what is stored: your account, your conversations, your logs.

Objection to certain processing, including training.

The honest limitation

Erasure cannot remove from an already trained model what was used to train it. Technically, you would have to retrain everything. This is an open question, debated by regulators, and no one should promise you otherwise.

How to do it, in practice

First, check the service settings: export, deletion, and objection are almost always there. If that is not enough, write to the data protection officer, whose address is in the privacy policy. If there is no response within a month, you can lodge a complaint with the CNIL, free of charge, online.

The final word for this level

You now know how to craft a precise request, have your texts reviewed, learn without being carried along, create an image, and understand where your data goes. That is more than enough to use it seriously.