The harbinger of the AI revolution, ChatGPT, remains the most popular AI tool on the market, with more than 200 million weekly active users.
But amongst all its competitors, which AI chatbots are collecting the most user data? And why does that matter?
Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu visualizes data from Surfshark which identified the most popular AI chatbots and analyzed their privacy details on the Apple App Store.
At first place, Google’s Gemini (released March, 2023) collects 22 different data points across 10 categories, from its users.
Data collected ranges from general diagnostics (that all bots in this study collect) to access to contacts (that no other bot identified collects).
xAI’s Grok (released November, 2023) collects the least unique data points (7).
China’s DeepSeek (released Jan 2025), sits comfortably in the middle of the pack at 11 points.
The kind of data collected by each of these AI tools varies. All of them collected general diagnostics information. However, only Gemini and Perplexity look at purchases.
And then, nearly all but Perplexity.ai and Grok collect user content.
Hellbound and Down 