AI is the Trojan Horse for Surveillance
OpenAI just shipped a plugin that lets ChatGPT read, search, and reply to messages in your Mac's Messages app. That's convenient. It's also a quiet dismantling of everything Apple's end-to-end encryption was built to protect, and I've seen this company do this before.
In January I wrote about why I stopped using ChatGPT: its founder, Sam Altman, also co-founded Worldcoin, a project that paid people across Africa $25 to scan their iris and hand over their biometric data, until a Kenyan court ordered it deleted. Now the same company wants Full Disk Access, Contacts, and Automation permissions on your Mac, and it wants to read every private thought you've ever typed.
Here is what that actually means. Encryption protects your messages only in transit. The moment ChatGPT summarizes a thread or drafts a reply, that content leaves your machine and sits on OpenAI's servers in plaintext. OpenAI says the plugin "runs locally" but running locally is not the same as keeping your data on your device. If you sync Messages through iCloud, which most people do without thinking about it, that's potentially years of conversations, attachments, and identities, plus every SMS two-factor code your iPhone forwards to your Mac.
In this case ChatGPT is the culprit, but in fact all centralized, closed AI software pushes users to give away all their private data, messages and thoughts. For over a decade, governments demanded a backdoor into iMessage and Apple refused them. This plugin builds that backdoor, and people are opening it themselves, for free, because it's convenient.
And it isn't only your privacy at stake. If you've enabled this, everyone who has ever texted you is exposed too, and none of them agreed to that.
Privacy isn't about having something to hide, and it is not about you alone. It's about deciding who gets to look at what, and protecting those who might need privacy more than you do, those who challenge power by standing up to leaders and keep powers in check. If we lose privacy, we lose democracy and human rights.
I don't use ChatGPT, and this is exactly why. I am watching the space for open sourced AI tools closely and might scrap my Claude subscription soon. If you want AI as a tool and not a trap, I wrote about the tools I actually use here: Privacy AI Is Possible.
