Most data leaks don’t come from elite hackers. They come from apps you forgot you logged into, permissions you clicked “Allow” on years ago, and things you typed into an AI chat. You can fix most of them yourself, on your phone, right now.
This page uses no cookies, no analytics and no third-party requests. Your ticks are saved only in this browser.
Every “Sign in with…” and every “Allow access” hands an app a key to your account. Those keys don’t expire on their own, and they keep working after the app is sold, abandoned or breached.
In August 2025, attackers stole the access tokens of Drift, a sales chat app connected to Salesforce. Google’s threat team estimated more than 700 organizations were affected. Nobody needed a password, because the app was already trusted.
Salesloft Drift breach · Google Threat Intelligence GroupYour phone often tells apps more than your posts do. One post is harmless. A hundred posts with locations and routines draw a map of your life.
In 2018, a fitness app published a heatmap built from over a billion workouts. It traced the outlines of military bases, even though each runner had only shared their own route.
Strava Global Heatmap · January 2018An AI chat feels like a private diary, but it’s a document stored on someone else’s server. And in some AI tools, “Share” has meant “publish”.
In summer 2025, shared ChatGPT conversations turned up in Google search. A few weeks later, Forbes found more than 370,000 Grok chats indexed, some with medical questions and at least one password.
Fast Company, July 2025 · Forbes, August 2025Before you hit Enter, imagine your prompt on a billboard with your name under it. If that makes you sweat, sanitize it first. The AI almost never needs the sensitive part to do the job.
It catches emails, phone numbers, card and bank numbers, API keys, passwords, IP addresses and private links. It can’t catch names, clients or project details, so swap those for roles yourself (“Maria at Acme” becomes “a hotel guest”).
Everything you just fixed will drift back: new apps, new logins, new chats. Security is a habit, not a heroic act.