You Can Now Lock Your Private ChatGPT Conversations With a PIN

If you have personal conversations with ChatGPT that you do not want other people to see, you can now add extra protection to those chats. The new Locked Chats feature lets you hide private conversations behind a four-digit account PIN. On mobile devices, you can also use biometric security, such as your face or fingerprint. This helps stop other people who can access your device or screen from reading those chats.

Locked chats stay in your chat history, unlike temporary chats, which are private conversations that are not saved by default. This means you can return to locked chats or continue them whenever you want. However, locked chats are hidden from your normal chat history, pinned chats, and regular conversation search. To open them, go to Projects > Locked chats and enter your PIN or unlock your device using a method such as Face ID or Touch ID.

How to set up Locked Chats on ChatGPT

To lock a chat for the first time, open an existing conversation you want to keep private and open its options menu. Select Lock chat > Lock chat, then create or enter your account PIN. The conversation will move to your locked chats project. You can do this with any existing conversation. You can also start a new locked chat by going to Projects > Locked Chats, entering your PIN or using your authentication method, and typing a message to start the conversation. When you finish, select Lock now to close access to locked chats and hide them from the sidebar.

If you have not set up an account PIN yet, ChatGPT should ask you to create one when you first try to lock a chat. Select Create a PIN, enter a four-digit code, and enter it again to confirm. You can also turn on biometric authentication in the Account PIN settings. If you reset your account PIN later, all locked chats will be permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.

Locked chats are available on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu plans in both mobile and desktop apps. The feature is not available in ChatGPT for Healthcare. There are other limits, too. You cannot lock temporary, archived, or group chats. You also cannot lock chats that have shared links, scheduled or background tasks, or meeting recordings. OpenAI says the feature is being released gradually, so it may not be available to everyone yet.

Locked chats are not encrypted

Locked chats add privacy by hiding conversations on your device, but they do not encrypt the chats or stop OpenAI from keeping or using them. As the support page explains, locked chats are not protected with end-to-end encryption or stored in a separate, encrypted vault. Locking a chat also does not change other privacy settings, such as Improve the model for everyone, which you can turn off under Settings > Data controls. It also does not remove information that ChatGPT already knows about you.