The short answer is: it depends on which version of ChatGPT you're using, what type of customer data is involved, and what your Privacy Act obligations are. Here's what Australian businesses need to know.
The free tier of ChatGPT (chatgpt.com) uses conversation data for model training. Feeding customer personal information into a free ChatGPT conversation is almost certainly a disclosure to a third party under the Australian Privacy Act — and without appropriate consent from your customers and data processing agreements with OpenAI, this is likely non-compliant. Do not put customer names, emails, phone numbers, health information, financial records, or any other personal data into free-tier ChatGPT. ChatGPT Team ($25/user/month USD) and ChatGPT Enterprise both contractually commit to not training models on your data, and include data processing terms that provide a better compliance basis. However, data is still processed on US servers — which triggers the APP 8 offshore disclosure obligation. For most commercial data (business names, emails in a business context) this is manageable with appropriate privacy policy disclosure; for sensitive personal information (health, financial, identity data) the requirements are stricter.
For businesses with genuine data sovereignty requirements — healthcare providers, financial services firms, government-adjacent businesses — the appropriate solutions are Azure OpenAI with Australian region processing (Microsoft maintains Australian data centres), or on-premises/private cloud LLM deployments that keep data entirely within your environment. Cornerstone AI Partners helps businesses across these tiers implement the right level of data protection for their specific AI use case and customer commitments.
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