Hundreds of Contractors Are Reading ChatGPT Users' Conversations

Hundreds of contractors are reading real ChatGPT user conversations and rating the responses on a scale of 1 to 7 — that's what a 404 Media investigation revealed. Reviewers are hired through Crossing Hurdles and paid via Mercor; U.S.-based workers earn more than $50 an hour. Prompts are anonymized, but according to one reviewer, they can still contain personal data — and users have no idea.

I work through Claude Code — partly because Anthropic publicly documents how data is handled. But this story is a reminder: with any cloud model, your data can end up in front of a real person. The "Improve the model" toggle in ChatGPT is on by default, and the fact that human reviewers were involved had been buried in a FAQ since 2023 — long before anyone wrote about it.