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Blog
AI Chatbots and
Your Data
A DeepSeek database was found sitting
open on the internet, chat history included.
What the DeepSeek Leak Says About Every AI Chatbot
In late January 2025, a security research team at Wiz took a look at the public footprint of DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company whose chatbot had just shot to the top of the app store charts. Within minutes they found a database that anyone on the internet could query, no password required. Inside were more than a million log entries: people's conversations with the chatbot in plain text, secret keys that DeepSeek's own systems used to talk to each other, and details about how the service was built behind the scenes. DeepSeek locked it down quickly once it was told. Nobody can say who else looked first.
It is tempting to file that under "foreign startup, not my problem." The more useful lesson is that the chat window is the polished front of a system you cannot see, run by people you have never met, and the biggest names have had their own moments too:
March 2023: a ChatGPT bug showed users other people’s chat titles, and some subscribers’ partial payment details
2025: ChatGPT chats that users had “shared” turned up in Google search results, and OpenAI pulled the feature
2023: Samsung engineers pasted internal source code into ChatGPT, and the company banned the tools
Free and personal plans keep your chats on the provider’s servers and may train on them unless you turn that off
Where the Risk Actually Comes From
When you paste something into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or any of the others, it leaves your building. It is stored, it is logged, it may be reviewed by people for safety reasons, and it can be kept far longer than you expect, sometimes under legal orders the provider has no say in. From there, three things can go wrong. The provider can slip up, which is what happened at DeepSeek, where an ordinary configuration mistake left the data open to the world. The product can do something with your data that you did not anticipate, like the sharing feature that put private chats into Google. Or your own account can be the weak point: an AI login protected by a reused password hands a stranger the entire history of what you have told the tool. None of this means the tools are bad. We use them every day. It means the chat window deserves the same caution as an email to an outside vendor, not the casual trust of a notepad.
Think about what actually ends up in these tools at a small business. A customer list pasted in to be cleaned up. A contract to summarize. A tricky email to a client, with the client's details in it. A spreadsheet from the accounting system to be analyzed. A patient's or a tenant's situation described in enough detail to get useful advice. Every one of those is reasonable in the moment, and every one of them is now sitting on somebody else's server. The question to ask before pasting is the same one you would ask before emailing it to a stranger: if this showed up on the internet with my company's name attached, what would it cost me?
A Sensible AI Policy Fits on One Page
At 845Data we help businesses get the benefit of these tools without the exposure. That means picking which tools are approved and on which plans, since the business tiers generally do not train on your data and give you administrative control over accounts; turning off history and training where the setting exists; locking every AI login behind multi-factor authentication; and writing a short, plain-language rule set for staff about what never goes into a chatbot, starting with customer information, passwords, financial records, and anything you signed a confidentiality agreement about. For work that is too sensitive to leave the building at all, there are options that keep the data entirely under your control, including models that run on hardware you own.
If your team is already using ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or Gemini at work, and most teams are whether or not anyone decided they should, reach out to 845Data. We can look at what is being used and what is being shared, then put guardrails in place that keep the productivity and lose the exposure.