Are temporary or incognito AI chats private?

Temporary Chat and incognito-style modes sound like a privacy switch, and they do help — but they solve a narrower problem than most people think. Here's the gap between "won't be saved to my history" and "private."

What temporary mode actually does

Take ChatGPT's Temporary Chat: it won't appear in your history, the assistant won't remember it, and it isn't used for model training. That's a real privacy gain over the default — but it's about your visible history and training, not server storage.

What it doesn't do

The conversation still reaches the company's servers and, by their own policy, a copy is typically kept for up to 30 days for safety and abuse monitoring. It also stays tied to your account session and can be preserved under a court order, as the 2025 OpenAI case showed. 'Temporary' isn't 'never stored.'

True privacy vs temporary mode

A genuinely private chat stores nothing in the first place and needs no account — there's no 30-day copy and no identity attached. That's the difference between a setting that limits retention and a design that has no retention. notrack.ai is the latter.