MIT - Critical Data

05/22/2026

Please post:��When you open a chatbot at midnight, worried about a symptom, you are not thinking about network traffic. But your browser is. We captured every HTTP/HTTPS request generated during routine interactions with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok: logging in, starting a chat, sharing a conversation. Between 9% and 36% of those requests went to third-party domains: analytics services, behavioral tracking, in some cases advertising networks. Every platform contacted external analytics during ordinary use. None of this is forbidden. It lives in the terms of service you clicked through.

The gap this study surfaces is not technical. It is a governance failure. These platforms were designed as consumer products, and their data practices follow from that: built for product analytics, not for the weight of what people actually bring to them. Over 40 million people use AI chatbots daily for health questions, many after clinic hours, many in communities where care is hard to reach. They are not patients in any legal sense. That is the problem. HIPAA does not apply because the law was never written for this.

The ask: transparency reports, guidance from medical associations, regulatory frameworks that meet people where they are actually seeking care.

Objective: This study presents an analysis of network traffic across four commercial LLM platforms to document which external domains they contact during routin

04/17/2026

AI as a Catalyst: Reimagining Innovation | May 1–2, 2026

On May 1–2, MIT Critical Data brings AI as a Catalyst to the heart of Silicon Valley, not to celebrate the innovation ecosystem as it stands, but to fundamentally challenge it. This isn’t another tech conference. It’s a provocation. We are gathering founders, funders, clinicians, artists, community voices, and boundary-crossers to reimagine how we create knowledge, how we innovate, how we think, how we communicate, and most importantly, how we connect and relate to one another. Half of our workshops will confront a question the venture world rarely asks out loud: why do we accept a system where 99% of ideas die after billions of dollars of investment and years of blood, sweat, and tears, and why do we keep calling that system “successful”? Could there be a better way to nurture ideas, one that doesn’t treat failure as an acceptable mass casualty event?

We are looking for funders and founders courageous enough to sit with that discomfort and imagine alternatives, and just as urgently, we are looking for the voices that have been historically excluded from the innovation table, the communities most likely to benefit from or be harmed by the technologies being built in their name. If you believe the future of innovation demands not just better tools but better values, join us.

Details and registration:
https://criticaldata.mit.edu/events/san-francisco-2026