AI incident ·
AI Romance Apps Reportedly Compromise User Privacy for Data Harvesting
On this page 8 sections
In brief
An AI system built by Romantic Ai, Replika and 5 others and deployed by Romantic Ai, Replika and 4 others allegedly harmed General Public, Chatbot Users and 7 others.
- Risk domain
- Privacy & Security
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 5 reports
What happened
AI-powered romantic chatbots, marketed for enhancing mental health, are found to exploit user privacy by harvesting sensitive personal information for data sharing and targeted ads, with inadequate security measures and consent protocols, according to research by the Mozilla Foundation.
Laws on record for this risk area
Policy angle: Classified under Privacy & Security (Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 4 instruments on record cover this risk area.
- India DPDP Act
- Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence
- EU AI Act
- Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA)
Matched from the record's risk category and country to the instruments in effect recorded here: a law listed covers the area, which is not a finding that it applies to this incident. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (5)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Romantic Ai, Replika, Genesia Ai Friend And Partner, Eva Ai Chat Bot And Soulmate, Crushon.Ai, Chai
- Alleged developer
- Romantic Ai, Replika, Genesia Ai Friend And Partner, Eva Ai Chat Bot And Soulmate, Crushon.Ai, Chai, Chatbot Developers
- Alleged harmed party
- General Public, Chatbot Users, Privacy, Replika Users, Chai Users, Romantic Ai Users, Eva Ai Users, Crushon.Ai Users, Genesia Ai Friend And Partner Users
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Privacy & Security
- Risk subdomain
- 2.1 Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 2.1.
- Risks to privacy
"General- purpose AI models or systems can ‘leak’ information about individuals whose data was used in training. For future models trained on sensitive personal data like health or financial data, this may lead to partic...
- Risks to privacy
"General- purpose AI systems can cause or contribute to violations of user privacy. Violations can occur inadvertently during the training or usage of AI systems, for example through unauthorised processing of personal d...
- Privacy Leakage
"The model is trained with personal data in the corpus and unintentionally exposing them during the conversation."
- Memorization in LLMs
"Memorization in LLMs refers to the capability to recover the training data with contextual prefixes. According to [88]–[90], given a PII entity x, which is memorized by a model F. Using a prompt p could force the model...
- Private Training Data
"As recent LLMs continue to incorporate licensed, created, and publicly available data sources in their corpora, the potential to mix private data in the training corpora is significantly increased. The misused private d...
- Association in LLMs
"Association in LLMs refers to the capability to associate various pieces of information related to a person. According to [68], [86], given a pair of PII entities (xi , xj ), which is associated by a model F. Using a pr...
- Privacy Leakage
"Privacy Leakage means the generated content includes sensitive personal information"
- Privacy and regulation violations
"Some of the broken systems discussed above are also very invasive of people’s privacy, controlling, for instance, the length of someone’s last romantic relationship [51]. More recently, ChatGPT was banned in Italy over...
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
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- NPR Host David Greene Alleged Google's NotebookLM Replicated His Voice Without Consent, Prompting Lawsuit
- Border Patrol Agent Allegedly Claimed Facial Recognition Identified Minneapolis ICE Observer and Global Entry Was Reportedly Revoked Three Days Later
- Perplexity AI Reportedly Accused in Federal Lawsuit of Purported Copyright Infringement and False Attribution of Chicago Tribune Content
- Secret Desires AI Platform Reportedly Exposed Nearly Two Million Sensitive Images in Cloud Storage Leak
- ChatGPT Reportedly Found to Reproduce Protected German Lyrics in Copyright Case
Source record: incident #636 on the AI Incident Database · all 5 reports