Penny for Your Prompts: A Measurement Study of Contextual Leakage in AI Chat Platforms

Summary

AI chatbot platforms have become one of the most popular web interfaces users interact with online, routinely receiving personal and intimate information shared under an expectation of privacy. Yet, on the web application side, these platforms have the ability to embed third-party analytics, advertising, and session replay scripts that operate silently alongside the chatbot, creating an underexamined channel for conversational data leakage towards third parties. We conduct the first systematic large-scale measurement study of contextual leakage in AI chatbots, auditing the web interfaces of 42 general-purpose and domain-specific (health, legal, and education) platforms. Beyond standard network interception, we instrument the browser at the JavaScript engine level to attribute each data flow to the exact user action that triggered it, and the DOM capture mechanism used to retrieve its content, a granularity invisible to network-layer analysis alone. We find that 21 of these platforms leak conversation titles to third-party trackers, while nine leak verbatim user prompts. Beyond content, we observe a substantial amount of chatbot platforms sending user emails to third-party trackers, enabling the association of conversational context with a user's identity. Our findings cast traditional web privacy issues under a new light, highlighting the privacy issues that are inherent in how users interact with modern AI chatbots.