For Doe, he was “dismayed” to learn that full and partial transcripts of chats discussing his family’s financial data were apparently shared with Google and Meta, allegedly along with PII. He relies on Perplexity to help him manage his taxes, get legal advice and make investment decisions, according to his complaint. Without a court order blocking Perplexity’s alleged continued privacy harms, it will be prevented from using its preferred search engine, it complained.
Other users in the proposed class likely turned to Perplexity when researching other sensitive topics, the lawsuit alleges. According to the lawsuit, the companies designed ad trackers to operate “surreptitiously” so that they could allegedly “exploit this sensitive data for their own benefit, including by targeting individuals with advertising and reselling their sensitive data to additional third parties.”
Perhaps most worrying is that people frequently use these artificial intelligence systems to search for medical and health information, especially when consulting with a human being can be embarrassing or disturbing.
Allegedly taking advantage of users’ tendency to overshare with artificial intelligence systems, Perplexity is apparently trained to request that users upload sensitive logs during chat sessions, according to the complaint. That includes information that, if shared with Google and Meta, could result in users being suddenly directed to ads that “they may find overwhelming, disturbing, or, in many cases, physically harmful,” according to the complaint.
For example, Perplexity answers a basic question like “What is the best treatment for liver cancer?” volunteering that “I can help you interpret a specific scan report, biopsy result, or proposed treatment plan if you share more details,” the complaint states.
Among the invasive trackers built into Perplexity’s AI search engine are Facebook Meta Pixel, Google Ads and Google Double Click, as well as possibly a technology Meta calls the “Conversions API,” according to the lawsuit. Meta allegedly recommends that partners use that latest technology in combination with Meta Pixel, because it supposedly serves as a “workaround” that prevents “power users” from blocking Pixel tracking, according to its complaint. In particular, Meta has been hit by several privacy lawsuits opposing that technology, with some settling, while Congress has criticized some former partners who used Google and Meta trackers.
