Ever since OpenAI launches its Language Learning Model (LLM) called ChatGPT, its popularity is growing day by day.
The recent version of their LLM model called ChatGPT-4 is even more powerful than its predecessors.
Web Browser and Code Interpreter Plugin Makes ChatGPT-4 Powerful
ChatGPT-4 has the ability to browse the web and present you the result based on real-time Internet data.
It can do so through its self-made and hosted plugin called Web Browser.
I mean, with this powerful tool you can do a plethora of things. For example, you can use it to analyze the latest set of rules to file your income tax, identify growing trends in different industries, and many others you can imagine.
While right now OpenAI has enabled around 11 third-party plugins that you can collaboratively use with ChatGPT 4, one other plugin that OpenAI has made itself is the Code Interpreter plugin.
You can think of the Code Interpreter plugin as a Programming assistant working under you fulfilling your desired programming need at the speed of your fingertip. With the Code Interpreter plugin, you can solve both quantitative and qualitative mathematical problems. You can do data analysis and visualization, convert one file format to another, and more.
Now, on one hand, while the ChatGPT is so powerful and can help you to fill flying colors in your life, on other hand, looking at the current stage, web developers, server managers, and all the other professionals managing private data of their, clients and organization should take care of which data ChatGPT could access and which ones it can’t.
Well, this article is specifically about how to protect your data from ChatGPT Plugins.
OpenAI Respects Your Privacy
First and foremost, do understand this, I am not writing this article for any kind of biasing. Here, I am just explaining, in this AI-evolving future, how you can manage your privacy online.
Well, thanks to OpenAI that it has programmed ChatGPT to respect website’s privacy.
Now, how does ChatGPT access your website’s data, and more importantly, how you are allowing it to do so?
Well, ChatGPT accesses your website’s data through its crawler or you can say bot, like any other search engine. For example, Google has GoogleBot, Bing has BingBot, and so on.
Now, if you know, you are allowing all these crawlers to access your website’s data through your website’s robots.txt file.
ChatGPT also has a bot called ChatGPT Bot that accesses the website’s data and thanks to OpenAI that it has programmed ChatGPT Bot to respect users’ choices regarding their website’s privacy through the robots.txt file.
How to Protect Website’s Data from ChatGPT Plugins through Robot.txt file customization?
You can disallow ChatGPT Plugins to access your website’s data by adding the below code to your website’s robots.txt file.
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /
If you don’t want to disallow ChatGPT plugins to access your whole website and allow it to access partial folders, then, you can add the below code.
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow:
Allow: /directory-1/
Allow: /directory-2/
That’s it! As soon as you paste the above code in your robots.txt file, the next time the ChatGPT bot came to read your website’s data, it first takes a look at your website’s robots.txt file and there it will see that you asked the bot to stop accessing the website data.
What do you think about this feature? Eager to know your opinions in the comments down below.