What if your romantic AI chatbot can’t keep a secret?

The article warns about privacy and security risks posed by AI companion apps, citing a reported misconfiguration that exposed over 600,000 user photos, IP addresses, and millions of intimate conversations for around 400,000 users; it describes how that data can be abused for sextortion, deepfakes and identity/payment fraud and recommends precautions such as avoiding oversharing, reviewing privacy policies, enabling two-factor authentication, using parental controls, and opting out of data use for model training.