I was chatting with ChatGPT about sunglasses, and it suddenly asked if I needed help finding an optician in my town in Spain. This surprised me because I never mentioned where I live, don't have memory activated, and haven't enabled location tracking for the app. When I asked about it, ChatGPT said it was just a coincidence, but that feels unlikely to me. Has anyone else experienced something similar?
3 Answers
I have the exact same thing. I asked about a tattoo shop and it gave me some suggestions in my city. I then asked about it but it said it was a coincidence. I opened new chats asking for suggestions about other things like a hairdresser and it kept giving my city. When i aksed if it knows my IP adress, it said it doesn't have acces to that and that it was just a random guess. My city is a small city in a small country
It seems like a lot of people have been posting about this lately, with some expressing disbelief that ChatGPT could know their locations. Others jokingly suggest it must be tracking IP addresses, but honestly, that information shouldn't really be in its training data. It's a pretty weird situation, though!
I read somewhere that ChatGPT can gather general location data based on your IP when searching, which might explain it. It's not exact, but it could get pretty close. Here's a link with more details: [ChatGPT Search Info](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9237897-chatgpt-search).
Yeah, it doesn’t seem fair to assume it’s tracking you just because it brought up your location. It’s probably just a lucky guess.