Whenever you query ChatGPT to find answers to the questions you have, the AI assistant keeps a running history of past conversations for those who’ve signed in with an account so they can either easily reference them in the future or pick up where they left off with any follow-up dialogue.
As some users are more privacy-conscious than others, it’s worth noting that the ChatGPT app provides a way to clear all previously entered queries, so they stop appearing in your app’s history. In today’s tutorial, we’ll be showing you how to take advantage of this feature in the ChatGPT app on the Mac and on the iPhone or iPad.
What you need to know
ChatGPT keeps these queries in your history so that you can easily reference them for future conversations or pick up where you left off with potential follow-up dialogue. You may want to keep your chat histories for this fact alone. But if you’ve been asking private or questionable things, then we’d completely understand why you may not want that lingering in your chat history for someone else to find.
One thing that we’d like to underscore right off the bat is that while clearing your chat history might make your previous conversations less accessible in the ChatGPT app, your conversations have been uploaded to OpenAI’s servers, and so ChatGPT will likely still be able to access your previous chats. For example, reference this Reddit thread where users have reported digging up previous conversations even after deleting their chat history.
There could be a myriad of reasons as to why this is the case, such as complying with law enforcement requests to retain a paper trail of questionable queries, keeping chat histories to train language models, and perhaps just to further improve the user experience by tailoring the chat experience to your query style. We can only speculate since only OpenAI can answer for this, but it does seem frustrating that the service holds on to queries even after a user has requested to delete them.
Still, deleting your chat history will remove remnants of those queries from your ChatGPT app, which is enough for most people who want to keep peeping eyes out of their business. So we’ll move on to the how-to part in the next section.
How to clear ChatGPT query history
In the first section, we’ll show you how to do this in macOS. After that, we’ll show the reciprocal steps to take on iOS & iPadOS.
On macOS
To clear your ChatGPT query history in macOS, follow the steps outlined below:
1) Launch the ChatGPT app on your Mac if you haven’t already.
2) Click on your name in the bottom-left corner of the app:
3) Click on the Settings button in the drop-down menu.
4) Click on the Data Controls option in the menu:
5) Click on the Delete All Chats option in the menu:
6) Click on the Confirm button in the pop-up prompt:
Your chat history in the ChatGPT app for macOS should now be absent from the sidebar:
Congratulations, you’ve just cleared your chat history in the ChatGPT app for macOS. The steps should be very similar in the Windows version of the app if you’re using a Windows PC.
On iOS or iPadOS
To clear your ChatGPT query history in iOS or iPadOS, follow the steps outlined below:
1) Launch the ChatGPT app if you haven’t already.
2) Tap on the Hamburger button at the top-left of the app:
3) Tap on your name at the bottom-left of the app:
4) Tap on the Data Controls option from the menu:
5) Tap the Delete All Chats option from the menu list:
6) Tap the Confirm button in the pop-up prompt:
A green check mark should now appear to let you know that the ChatGPT chat history deletion was successful:
Congratulations, you’ve just cleared your chat history in the ChatGPT app for iOS & iPadOS.
Wrapping up
Deleting your chat or query history from the ChatGPT app is a good way to prevent prying eyes from learning about the types of things you’ve been asking your AI chat bot about. If you’re like many people, and you use these services to ask questions you’re too shy to ask a real person about, then this is a good way to preserve your dignity.
Please note, however, that ChatGPT may still store your conversations off-site, so the chat bot may still be able to reference past conversations even after you’ve deleted your conversation history. This method only removes a running history of your chats from the app itself.