Privacy Concerns and ChatGPT: Exploring Online Discourse through the Lens of Information Practice on Reddit

2025-11-22

AI Summary

As ChatGPT proliferates across education, writing assistance, and health consultation, growing public concern surrounds the privacy risks associated with prompt inputs and interactive data. Method: Grounded in information practices theory, this study pioneers an integrated approach combining BERTopic-based thematic modeling and qualitative discourse analysis to systematically examine 426 Reddit posts and 1,900 comments. Contribution/Results: Findings reveal that Reddit functions as a critical public sphere for cultivating AI privacy literacy and collective response. The analysis identifies three emergent adaptive practices: (1) risk signal recognition, (2) formation of normative consensus, and (3) decentralized technical resistance. These practices reflect how users collaboratively identify threats, negotiate shared norms, and enact grassroots countermeasures—such as prompt obfuscation or tool avoidance—without centralized coordination. The study advances theoretical understanding of public participation in AI governance and offers a novel methodological framework bridging computational and interpretive social science approaches.

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Privacy & Security
• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Security and Privacy: Privacy-enhancing technologies
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI

Abstract

As millions of people use ChatGPT for tasks such as education, writing assistance, and health advice, concerns have grown about how personal prompts and data are stored and used. This study explores how Reddit users collectively negotiate and respond to these privacy concerns. Posts were collected from three major subreddits -- r/Chatgpt, r/privacy, and r/OpenAI -- between November 2022 and May 2025. An iterative keyword search followed by manual screening resulted in a final dataset of 426 posts and 1,900 comments. Using information practice as the theoretical lens, we conducted a qualitative thematic analysis to identify collective practices of risk negotiation, validated with BERTopic topic modeling to ensure thematic saturation. Findings revealed risk signaling, norm-setting, and resignation as dominant discourses, and collective troubleshooting and advocacy for privacy-preserving alternatives as key adaptive practices. Reddit functions as a site of collective sense-making where users surface risks, establish informal norms, and share strategies for mitigating privacy threats, offering insights for AI design and privacy literacy initiatives.

Problem

• Explores how Reddit users collectively negotiate privacy concerns regarding ChatGPT
• Analyzes risk signaling and adaptive practices in online discourse about AI privacy
• Investigates collective sense-making around data storage and usage of personal prompts

Innovation

• Using qualitative thematic analysis with information practice lens
• Validating findings with BERTopic topic modeling approach
• Analyzing Reddit discourse on privacy concerns collectively