What the commissioners announced
On May 6, 2026, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada announced the results of a joint investigation into OpenAI's ChatGPT. It was carried out with its provincial counterparts in Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta.
The investigation looked at how OpenAI handled personal information, in particular to train ChatGPT. Each office assessed it under its own law, so the conclusions vary from one office to another.
What they found
The four regulators concluded that "the way that OpenAI had initially trained ChatGPT was not compliant with their respective privacy laws."
They raised concerns about collecting more personal information than needed, consent, transparency, factual errors, people’s ability to access or change their information, and organisational responsibility for that information.
Under the federal law, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada found the complaint "well-founded and conditionally resolved."
What this is, and what it isn't.
This is a finding by privacy regulators about how ChatGPT was initially trained. The announcement doesn't tell people whether to use ChatGPT, and this article doesn't either. For the full findings, read the commissioners' own announcement on priv.gc.ca.
What OpenAI has done since, according to the commissioners
The announcement says OpenAI changed its practices in response and reduced the personal and sensitive information used in training new models. OpenAI also committed to further measures in the coming months, which the federal office says it will monitor.
The announcement doesn't give advice to individuals. If you want to know what happens to your own chats in ChatGPT, the place to check is ChatGPT's own settings and privacy policy.
Keeping your own copy of a chat
Whatever you decide about using ChatGPT, it can be useful to have your important conversations as files on your computer: to keep a record, to find something later, or before you delete a chat from your history.
Print to PDF from the browser. Open the chat, press Ctrl+P (or Cmd+P on a Mac) and choose Save as PDF. Free and built in, but often messy on a long chat.
Export all your data from ChatGPT. Settings, then Data controls, then Export data: you get a link by email to a .zip of your whole history. Useful for a backup, but check what is included and whether data export is available for your account.
Export one chat with Uncook, below.
The faster way: Export, in Uncook
With the Uncook extension, open the chat in ChatGPT, click the Uncook icon and choose Export. Pick PDF, Markdown or plain text: you get the chat itself, clean, without the page around it.
Export runs in your browser, through the extension. The chat isn't sent to our servers, and nothing is kept on our side. The file goes where you save it.
It's free, PDF included, and it doesn't count as a task. It works on chats from Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Mistral Vibe (ex-Le Chat), Gemini Notebook and Google AI Studio too.
Exporting a chat makes a copy. It doesn't change anything in ChatGPT: the chat stays in your history until you delete it there.
Questions people ask
Does this mean I shouldn't use ChatGPT? The announcement doesn't say that. It reports that the way OpenAI initially trained ChatGPT didn't comply with the regulators' privacy laws, and the measures OpenAI has taken since. The full findings are on the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's website.
Does exporting a chat delete it from ChatGPT? No. Export makes a copy on your computer. To delete a chat from ChatGPT, do it in ChatGPT.
When I use Export, does Uncook see my chat? No. Export runs in your browser, through the extension. The chat isn't sent to our servers, and nothing is kept on our side.
Start fresh,
without starting over.
Add to Chrome
Export runs in your browser, through the extension. The chat isn't sent to our servers, and nothing is kept on our side.
We don't keep the conversations you bring. When you click Send to Uncook in the extension window, the extension sends the chat from your tab to our servers, encrypted, for up to 30 minutes, and we delete it as soon as your Uncook page opens it. What Uncook makes from it is kept as a task, for as long as our Privacy page says. Neither your chats nor your tasks are used to train AI models.