CNET reported on August 27, 2026, on a DuckDuckGo survey examining what US adults disclose to AI chatbots and what they understand about data handling. The clearest result is behavioral: among respondents who use AI, 32% said they had told a chatbot something they withheld from a close friend, parent, colleague, doctor or therapist.
What the survey measured
DuckDuckGo's published methodology says the company commissioned an online survey of 1,944 US adults from June 17 to June 27. Quotas balanced age, gender and region against Census demographics, but results were reported unweighted. The stated margin of error is about 2.2 percentage points for the full sample and larger for subgroups.
The survey reports that disclosure rose to 56% among self-described AI enthusiasts who use chatbots. It also found that 53% of respondents did not know or were unsure that most chatbots train on conversations by default, and only 25% knew AI chats could be subpoenaed. These figures describe this US online sample; they are not measurements of every user or country.
“Private” depends on the product and settings
CNET's original report uses the survey to warn against treating a chatbot like a confidential human adviser. That caution is useful, but policies vary. A service may use chats for model improvement, retain them for safety, attach them to an account, allow an opt-out, offer temporary chat, or apply different terms to business accounts.
Users therefore should not assume either that every conversation trains a model or that deleting the visible chat instantly removes every retained copy. The responsible step is to read the policy for the exact product and account tier, including retention, human review, legal disclosure and administrator access.
A practical privacy rule
Before sending a prompt, remove names, account numbers, health identifiers, customer records, confidential code and other details that are unnecessary for the task. For workplace use, follow the employer's approved-tool and data-classification rules. When sensitive context is essential, choose a service and contract that explicitly meet the required privacy and retention controls.
The same discipline applies to screenshots and uploaded files: a redacted prompt can still expose private information through an attachment. Chatbots can be useful without becoming the default repository for material that would be risky in email, tickets or shared documents.
Sources and methodology
This article uses CNET's August 27 report and DuckDuckGo's survey publication. DuckDuckGo sells a privacy-focused AI product, so its interpretation is treated as an interested-party perspective; the sample design and reported figures are presented separately from broader recommendations.