DP News – Week 13. ChatGPT conceded a bug exposing emails and search history, EU member states have agreed on common position as regards Data Act.

Open AI, the developer of ChatGPT, moved it offline for some time last week due to a bug in an open-source library. The bug allowed some users to see titles from another active user’s chat history, as well as, in some cases, the first message of a new conversation.

Further to this, Open AI admits that “the same bug may have caused the unintentional visibility of payment-related information of 1.2% of the ChatGPT Plus subscribers who were active during a specific nine-hour window”. In particular, what was also exposed is, as Open AI claims, “another active user’s first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date. Full credit card numbers were not exposed at any time”.

Although Open AI believes that the number of affected users is very low, all of them were notified that their payment information might have been exposed. As it also claims, ‘the bug is now patched. We were able to restore both the ChatGPT service and, later, its chat history feature, with the exception of a few hours of history’.

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As the EU Council’s press release mentions, EU “‘member states’ representatives (Coreper) reached a common position (“negotiating mandate”) allowing the Council to enter negotiations with the European Parliament on the proposed legislation regarding harmonised rules on fair access to and use of data (data act)”.

The Council made several amendments to the initial proposal coming from the EU Commision, in particular, as regards the the scope of the act, especially with regard to Internet of Things (IoT) data, clarifications on the interplay between the Data Act and other existing legislation, such as the data governance act (DGA) and the general data protection regulation (GDPR), dispute settlement mechanisms, etc.

As for the next steps, this will “allow the Swedish presidency to enter negotiations with the European Parliament (“trilogues”) on the final version of the proposed legislation”.