Privacy Guide

What ChatGPT knows
about you, and how to wipe it

By Dan Donovan, @askdandonovan

Deleting the memory list is only half the job. Your old conversations stay in your account, and the profile gets rebuilt from them. Here are both steps, for ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

2 Steps
~5 min Time
3 Assistants
$0 Cost

What this actually is

Your assistant holds two separate things about you, and they are managed in two different places.

The stored profile is a list of things it has kept. Your job, your city, that you prefer short answers, that you are learning Spanish. On most assistants you can read this in plain language and delete it line by line.

Your conversation history is everything you have ever typed. It is a separate pile, and deleting the profile does not touch it.

Here is the part that catches people. Modern assistants do not only remember what you asked them to remember. They read across your old conversations and work things out. So if you empty the profile and leave the conversations, the raw material is untouched and the profile can be written again from it. You wiped the summary. You left the source.

What you'll have after this
The list, read properly
You have seen what it stored, including what it worked out rather than being told
The profile emptied
Deleted line by line, or all at once
The rebuild switched off
It can no longer draw a new profile out of your past chats
The same pass on all three
ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, using the same two steps
Do this in the next 10 minutes

Read it before you delete it

Most people go straight to the delete button and never look. Looking is the useful part, because some of what is in there was worked out about you rather than told. Paste this into whichever assistant you use most.

Paste into your assistant 
List everything you currently have stored about me, as one complete list.
Include anything you inferred rather than being told, and mark those separately.
Do not summarise and do not leave anything out.
For each item, say whether it came from something I stated directly or from
something you worked out.
Treat the answer as a reading aid, not an audit. What an assistant says it remembers is not guaranteed to match what is actually stored, and it can miss things or fill gaps. The settings page is the authority. The prompt is just easier to read. If the two disagree, believe the settings page.
Before you start: nothing here needs a paid plan. Memory controls are free on ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. You will be in settings on each one, so this is easier on a laptop than a phone.
1

Empty the stored profile

This is the step nearly everybody already knows about, and it is worth doing carefully rather than fast.

In ChatGPT

Open Settings, then Personalisation, and find where it shows what it has stored about you. Read it first. Then delete individual entries, or clear the whole lot in one go.

  • Things you never said are the interesting ones. Rough income, likely age, where you probably live. Nobody typed those in.
  • Things that are wrong are worse than the correct ones, because it is confidently building on them. A stale job, an old city.
  • Things that are right and private. Health, money, family, anything about your work that is not yours to share.
Your screen may not match somebody else's, and that is expected. OpenAI has been changing how ChatGPT memory works, and the rollout reached different accounts at different times. Some people see a list of saved memories with separate toggles. Others see a single readable summary they can edit. The two steps in this guide are the same either way: deal with the profile, then deal with what rebuilds it. Look for the wording on your own screen rather than for a screenshot from somewhere else.
2

Turn off what rebuilds it

This is the half that gets skipped, and skipping it is why people find the profile back a few weeks later.

Stay on that same settings page. Alongside the stored profile there is a separate control for whether it can reference your past conversations. Turn that off.

Then go and deal with the conversations themselves. You do not have to delete everything. Delete the ones carrying things you would not say to a stranger. Those are the chats a new profile would be built from.

1
Profile emptied, history left alone
It builds back. This is what most people end up with.
2
Profile emptied, referencing off, old chats cleared
It stays gone. This is the whole point of the second step.
Worth knowing: deleting a chat does not delete a memory that was already saved from it, and deleting a memory does not delete the chat. They are two separate piles and each one has to be dealt with on its own.

The same pass on Claude and Gemini

Both keep something similar, and both use the same two steps. Read what is stored, remove what you do not want, then decide whether you want it referencing past conversations at all.

Claude

Claude also has an incognito chat, which is the fastest way to get an answer with nothing attached to it. Look for the ghost icon when you start a new chat outside a project. It is free on every plan, and it is the right move when you want an opinion that is not shaped by everything it already knows about you.

Claude has a second setting worth doing at the same time, and it is a different one to anything on this page: how long Claude keeps your chats at all. Here is the two minute Claude privacy checklist for that one, so this guide is not repeating it.

Gemini

Same shape again. Find the personalisation or memory controls in settings, read what is stored, delete what you do not want, then turn off the history referencing.

The one thing to remember

A cleared memory list is not a cleared memory, as long as the conversations it learned from are still sitting in your account. Two steps, not one.

Put a reminder in for three months. Memory fills back up from normal use, which is the feature working, and the point is to choose what is in there rather than to never have anything.