Tell HN: ChatGPT exports do not contain all conversation messages

Posted by afpx 10 hours ago

Counter5Comment1OpenOriginal

Just FYI - if you do an export from ChatGPT, verify the export data. I requested an export from ChatGPT a few days ago and received the zip this morning, but the zip is missing messages.

I know this because I manually downloaded several of the conversations before requesting the export, and the manual downloads contain the messages, but the export doesn't. I actually had ChatGPT do a second verification and it confirmed the missing messages.

I had ChatGPT generate a report showing concrete evidence of an export-integrity problem, not just a difference in titles or formatting. I then tried to submit the report via the chat on help.openai.com, and the chat stopped responding completely.

For context, the missing threads were completely benign (discussions regarding the historical development of Rabbinic Judaism), so this appears to be a technical data integrity bug rather than a moderation or filtering choice. Has anyone else noticed missing data in their recent OpenAI exports?

Comments

Comment by afpx 1 hour ago

Also, within a few hours of posting this, I received this odd email from “ privacy@openai.com” to the gmail address connected to my chatgpt account. I made no such request to them.

“Hi there,

Thank you for your message. To protect user privacy and for security reasons, we can only act on privacy requests once we have sufficiently verified account ownership. For this reason, please contact us directly from the email address linked to your account.

If you no longer have access to that email address, please let us know.

Best regards, John OpenAI Privacy Team”