• by Wendy Davis , Yesterday

A Utah man alleges in a new lawsuit that artificial intelligence company Perplexity shares "complete transcripts" of users' chats with Google and Meta, via analytics tools embedded in Perplexity's online site.

"No reasonable person would have expected that Perplexity would share complete transcripts of their conversations ... with companies like Meta and Google. But that is what Perplexity did," the plaintiff, proceeding anonymously as John Doe, alleges in a 140-page class-action complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco.

"The intimate health and financial information that users regularly share with Perplexity is some of the most private information about a user," the complaint alleges.

"Meta and Google knew that the data collected and received from Perplexity's AI machine included intimate personal health and financial data -- but they did nothing to stop Perplexity from sharing this data because it is vital to their business models," the plaintiff adds. (The complaint refers to Perplexity's search engine an "AI machine.")

The complaint includes claims that the companies violated various privacy laws, including California's wiretapping statute.

The Utah resident specifically alleges that he engaged in multiple chats with Perplexity's search engine about "tax advice, legal advice, and investing."

Those dialogues allegedly "included personal information about his family’s finances, his tax obligations, his investment portfolio, and his investment strategies."

The plaintiff adds that he believed those chats were private, and "was dismayed to discover that complete and partial transcripts of his communications with Perplexity were shared with Meta and Google every time that he interacted with Perplexity’s AI Machine."

Among allegations, the Utah resident says Perplexity shares entire users' entire prompts with Google and Facebook, along with users' email addresses, if they subscribed to Perplexity by creating a free account with the company.

"For example, a subscribed user who entered a prompt such as 'What is the best treatment for liver cancer?' would have had their entire prompt shared with Meta and Google via a full-string URL which was intercepted inside the user’s browser, then transmitted to Meta and Google," the complaint alleges.

A Perplexity spokesperson said the company hasn't yet been served with the lawsuit. Meta and Google have not yet responded to MediaPost's request for comment.