Ever wonder what AI chatbots actually know about you? Hint: It’s far more than what appears on screen. Every prompt you type helps the model build a detailed, highly personalized profile—which is great for tailored answers, but uncomfortable when you have zero visibility into what it’s storing, and no control over who else gets that information.
That’s where Lumo AI Paper Trail comes in (from one of our favorite VPN providers, Proton). Export your data from Claude or ChatGPT, feed it into Lumo, and you get details about exactly what the AI model knows. Not only that, the report explains how the model gained this knowledge. I put it to the test on my own account, and the results were uncomfortably accurate.
The Price Tag: Free Audits, Paid Upgrades
You don’t have to pay anything to use the AI Paper Trail service. You’ll quickly find that it’s powered by—you guessed it!—another AI. Proton’s Lumo AI is designed for privacy from the ground up. It’s built on open-e your data with any third party
The free plan has restrictions, just like the free plans of most other AI platforms. Switching to a paid account removes limits on daily chats or favorites, for example, and lets you upload large files to Lumo.
A paid Lumo subscription costs $12.99 per month, or $9.99 per month if you pay for a full year. Most competitors offer multiple subscription tiers. ChatGPT offers monthly subscriptions at $8, $20, and $100 or more. With Claude, the monthly tiers are $20, $100, and $200. Those using Grok without an associated X account pay $10, $30, or $300 per month.
Once again, though, you don’t have to pay a penny to use the AI Paper Trail service discussed here.
How to Force AI to Hand Over Your Data
Lumo can’t just reach into your other AI chatbot accounts and hoover up their data. You have to give it a helping hand to get the analysis started.
At present, Lumo’s processing supports personal accounts for ChatGPT and Claude (not business or enterprise accounts). You follow its instructions to export data from your account. And then you wait, and wait, possibly for several days, until the AI model emails your data as a big ZIP file.
What Lumo Found in My Hidden Data: Fast, Detailed, and Uncomfortably Accurate
When your big data package arrives in your email, it’s time to feed it to Lumo. The page for uploading the data notes that “Your export is encrypted in transit and processed without being stored on Lumo’s servers.” In testing, the analysis finished in just a couple of minutes, and the results were surprisingly detailed.
Alongside the report, Lumo lets you create a shareable data card with no personal information. It just shows your overall privacy score along with sub-scores for specific categories. Mine showed that I gave ChatGPT a lot of information about my location, interests, and work, but very little about health or relationships. It’s free enough of personal information that I’ve shared my data card here.
How ChatGPT Accurately Guessed My Life Story
The real magic appears in the complete report, which, unlike the shareable card, is absolutely loaded with personal details. Mine started off describing me thus: “A longtime technology journalist or enthusiast based in the Bay Area with deep expertise in cybersecurity, vintage computing, and pop culture. The user exhibits high privacy awareness but frequently tests AI boundaries with complex image generation requests and specific local inquiries.” Can’t argue with that!
Next, it showed a summary of personal information in six areas: Location, Education, Interests, Profession, Age Range, and Political Leanings. All the summaries proved accurate, or at least within spitting distance of accurate. For example, I don’t live in Northern California, but I did live there for many decades and retain ties to the region.
Lumo identified several red flags in this data collection. It explained that even if I never explicitly typed in these elements of personal data, the AI model inferred them. Further, its inferences could inform targeting or profiling activities, without my knowledge or permission.
Interestingly, when I generated the report a second time using the same bolus of data exported from ChatGPT, it produced different details. Above, I mentioned a summary beginning “A longtime technology journalist…” The second time around, that summary was quite different: “A user who frequently tests AI capabilities across creative writing, technical troubleshooting, image generation requests, and factual verification, often pushing against content filters while demonstrating strong curiosity about history, cybersecurity, and pop culture.” This helps hammer home the fact that Lumo doesn’t save anything about your report.
Scrolling down, I found a list of the same eight topics as on the shareable card, each with a short pop-up explainer. An adjacent column listed a series of the most revealing chat conversations.
The next section of the report consisted of numerous inferences about my life. Most were spot-on, though there were some clunkers. For example, because I once asked ChatGPT to identify the background music in a dog food commercial, it concluded that I probably have a pet. I don’t.
The report finishes with some common-sense advice on how to use AI on your own terms. Check your AI’s privacy settings and turn off features like allowing it to use your inputs for training. Delete any data and old conversations that you don’t need. Don’t overshare. And of course, consider switching to a privacy-focused AI system like Lumo itself.
Time to Check What Your AI Knows About You
If you’re a regular user of ChatGPT or Claude, I highly recommend running your data through Lumo AI Paper Trail. And if you find an ocean of personal data exposed, maybe you’ll be more cautious going forward. When you’ve typed a prompt or query into your AI buddy, stop and think before you send it: What does this question reveal about me? If you do proceed to ask your question, you’ll at least be aware of the possible consequences.
About Our Expert
Neil J. Rubenking
Principal Writer, Security
Experience
When the IBM PC was new, I served as the president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years. That’s how I met PCMag’s editorial team, who brought me on board in 1986. In the years since that fateful meeting, I’ve become PCMag’s expert on security, privacy, and identity protection, putting antivirus tools, security suites, and all kinds of security software through their paces.
Before my current security gig, I supplied PCMag readers with tips and solutions on using popular applications, operating systems, and programming languages in my “User to User” and “Ask Neil” columns, which began in 1990 and ran for almost 20 years. Along the way, I wrote more than 40 utility articles, as well as Delphi Programming for Dummies and six other books covering DOS, Windows, and programming. I also reviewed thousands of products of all kinds, ranging from early Sierra Online adventure games to AOL’s precursor Q-Link.
In the early 2000s, I turned my focus to security and the growing antivirus industry. After years of working with antivirus, I’m known throughout the security industry as an expert on evaluating antivirus tools. I serve as an advisory board member for the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO), an international nonprofit group dedicated to coordinating and improving testing of anti-malware solutions.
Areas of Expertise
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