ChatGPT Health: The Marketplace Where You Are the Product
From: https://consciousdigital.org/chatgpt-health-is-a-marketplace-guess-who-is-the-product/
OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Health service integrates medical records and wellness data (Apple Health, Peloton) to offer insurance comparisons and health advice. While marketed as a personal assistant, the infrastructure reveals a marketplace designed for insurers and payers.
Ther risks:
- The Partnership: OpenAI partnered with b.well, a company that helps insurers assess member risk “before the first claim.”
- The Privacy Gap: Data shared with OpenAI is generally not protected by HIPAA[1], leaving it subject to corporate policy rather than federal law.
- The Pay-to-be-Product Model: Even paid users are not exempt from data harvesting.
“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. ChatGPT showed us that even this formulation is too optimistic. You can pay for ChatGPT Plus or even Pro and still end up as the product.”
This serves as a grim reminder of how “privacy theatre” operates. I am very happy that this is not released in Europe. The fact that OpenAI has bypassed the EU, UK, and Switzerland—regions with strict GDPR enforcement—suggests the product cannot meet high privacy standards. When a company under financial pressure aggregates health data, you are no longer a patient; you are inventory.
HIPAA: US law protecting health information held by doctors and insurers, but often not tech platforms. ↩︎
