Why I Won't Be Giving ChatGPT Health My Medical Records
This week, OpenAI announced its new ChatGPT Health feature, which will let users upload their medical records and ask health related questions. However, I certainly won't be making use of it, it might not be the best idea for you to do it either, for both reliability and privacy reasons.
The new ChatGPT Health feature will be a sandboxed tab inside the app that is isolated from your conversation history in other conversations with the chatbot. This tab also allows users to connect a variety of health-tracking apps like Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, and Peloton, as well as uploading medical records directly.
It's important to note that this is a lot of really personal information to hand over to any tech company—but especially one that isn't primarily focused on providing medical services. OpenAI says that the ChatGPT Health space operates with "enhanced privacy to protect sensitive data," but it doesn't use end-to-end encryption to secure that data. And while the company says data collected via Health isn't used to train its foundation models, it's impossible to know whether that may change in the future. Security breaches can also occur (and have in the past), potentially leaving your medical records exposed.
There's also the question of whether the risk of uploading your data is worth it in the first place. According to OpenAI's own data, around 5% of all messages to ChatGPT are already users asking questions about their health, and ChatGPT (and other LLM tools) have a nasty habit of providing inaccurate diagnostic information. This is perhaps why OpenAI says that its new ChatGPT Health feature is "not intended for diagnosis or treatment."
Currently, there's a waitlist to sign up for ChatGPT Health, and over time it will roll out to all users. At the very least, that means that until the feature is available, it's probably a good idea not to ask the regular version of ChatGPT about your health concerns. At the very least, wait until the enhanced privacy sandbox is available. In the meantime, consider whether it makes more sense to just talk to your doctor directly if you have questions or concerns about your health.