Proton shipped a free tool called AI Paper Trail. You export your ChatGPT or Claude history, upload it, and it tells you what the model already inferred: identity, habits, relationships, a "privacy type," an exposure score.
That is a useful scare because it is specific. You can see the sentences. You can feel the file.
Sam Altman, in the clip Proton quote-tweeted, talks about a future with "no privacy, no agency, no freedom" and a perfect surveillance state. Believe him or don’t. The present tense is less cinematic and easier to act on.
Two dossiers, one of them is for sale
The AI dossier is made of things you typed. You can stop typing. You can delete chats. You can use a model that does not train on you, if you trust the label.
The broker dossier is made of things you never typed. Loyalty email. Voter file. Warranty card. A people-search scrape of your relatives. That file gets copied, sold, and re-listed. Flock’s OS Investigate reaches "commercial databases" that hold SSNs, dates of birth, phones, emails, and associates. That is not a chatbot. That is a checkout page.
You do not have a CCPA button inside ChatGPT that makes every downstream fine-tune forget you. You do have a CCPA (and GDPR, and 20+ state laws) button for the companies that sell the identity graph.
Use both. Do not pretend the first one replaces the second.
A 20-minute sequence
- Run Proton’s AI Paper Trail on an export, or just open your ChatGPT settings and delete what you can stand to lose.
- Google your name and city. Note the people-search hits.
- Send deletions to those brokers and to the brands that enriched the email they used to find you.
- Recheck in 30 days. If the listing is back, that is the product working as designed. Send again.
RemoveMyTracks is the third step on a timer. Soft Ghost, Hard Block, or Witness Protection, or 3 companies free with no card.
The perfect surveillance state, if it arrives, will be built out of imperfect files that already exist. Burn the cheap ones first.