Is it safe to upload your chat history to an AI?
What actually leaves your device when you upload a chat export to Portraitor, what stays in your browser, and the four parts of the answer that are not reassuring.
Portraitor replaces names, email addresses, telephone numbers, postal addresses and credentials in your own browser before any part of a chat export is transmitted, and its privacy policy says the masked text is discarded once your portrait has been produced. What is still sent is the subject matter of the conversation, carrying no name.
The question tends to arrive after the export is already sitting in a downloads folder. A chat export is a plain record of everything two people said to each other, which is an odd thing to hand to a web page. Everything below is taken from the Portraitor privacy policy, version 1.3, and from the home page, both read on 4 November 2026.
What leaves your device and what does not
Before any part of the conversation is transmitted, your browser replaces names, email addresses, telephone numbers, postal addresses and credentials with anonymous placeholders. The policy states that this happens entirely on your own device, and that if it does not complete successfully then no data is transmitted and your payment is refunded automatically.
What that removes is who is speaking. It does not remove what was discussed. The policy says this in plain words: if the people in the conversation talked about their health, beliefs, relationships or sexuality, those passages travel to the analysis provider inside the anonymised text, with no name attached.
So the honest shape of the answer is that identity and content are separated, and only one of the two is sent. The uploader on the Portraitor home page accepts .txt, .html, .json or .zip, and it takes four platforms: WhatsApp, which gives a .txt or a .zip, Telegram, which gives a .json, and Messenger and Instagram, which each give a .zip. The longer version of what is done with a chat after it arrives is on what Portraitor does with a WhatsApp chat.
The list that matches placeholders back to real names never leaves your browser
A masking step is only as good as what happens to the key. The policy says the list that matches each placeholder back to a real detail never leaves your device, and that neither Portraitor nor the analysis provider therefore learns who the other participants are.
Where the masking runs, and where that key is kept, is what the whole answer turns on. The two questions are worth asking of any tool, and the trade is set out at more length on Portraitor against Mosaic. The position of the other people in the chat, who never agreed to any of this, is covered in what happens to everyone else in the conversation.
Photographs, videos and voice notes are never opened
The WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram exports can all arrive as a .zip, and a .zip often carries attachments alongside the message log. The policy states that the Service never opens them and never transmits them, that only the written messages are read, on your device, and that only their masked text is sent.
That is a narrower promise than it first sounds, and the narrowness is the point. It is a statement about the files, not about the words. A photograph that somebody described in a message is still a described photograph inside the text that is sent.
What sits on a server, and for how long
The policy does not claim that nothing is held. It says the content of your conversation is not stored, that it is held only for as long as generation requires, that it is discarded once your portrait has been produced, and that conversation text is never written to the database, the backups or the logs.
It then states its own exception. A very large conversation arrives in parts and is held in a temporary file on the server until the analysis request is assembled, at which point it is consumed and deleted. An upload abandoned part-way becomes unreadable after fifteen minutes and is removed by daily maintenance.
There are also no user accounts. A single portrait is $10, bought as a guest with no account and no renewal, and a Pass is $19 a month for ten portraits that refill and can be shared from one pool. The policy says a Pass is an anonymous code not associated with a name or an email address, and that Portraitor is unable to identify the person using one. That mechanism is set out in how the anonymous Pass works.
Four things in the answer that are not reassuring
A page that listed only the comfortable facts would not be worth reading. These four cut the other way, and each of them is stated in the policy rather than dug out of it.
- The subject matter still travels. Masking removes identifiers, not topics. If the sensitive part of your conversation is what it was about rather than who was in it, masking does not reach it.
- The analysis provider keeps what it receives for a while. The policy says the provider retains submitted content for a limited period in order to monitor misuse of its own service, and that Portraitor is unable to disable that retention. On the terms of the tier it is used on, that provider does not use the text to train or improve its models, and it is not reviewed by the provider’s personnel for that purpose. Both halves of that are published, in section 10.
- The site itself sets analytics cookies. Google Analytics measures how the site is used, and the policy lists what it receives and says it never receives your conversation. Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track are honoured, so the analytics cookies are not set at all when a browser sends either signal. If a site that sets no cookies whatsoever is the requirement, this is not that site.
- Paying leaves a record. The email address given at checkout goes to Stripe, which the policy says holds the only copy while Portraitor keeps none. Payment records that contain no name, no email address and no card details are kept for seven years to satisfy tax law, and the hosting provider takes database copies that each persist for about a month.
Who should leave this alone: anyone who cannot honestly give the permission confirmation the checkout asks for before payment, and anyone for whom the topics in the conversation are the sensitive part rather than the names in it. The masking is specific about what it removes, and those are not it.
One consequence of that masking is worth following up, because it changes what any judgement about wording can rest on: the analysis reads the redacted text rather than the conversation as it was written. Can you tell if a message was written by AI works through what that means for the one inference people most often mistake for proof.
If the part of that path you want pinned down is the analysis provider itself, who else receives anything, and what the policy says about training, whether your chat is used to train AI works through the published register entry by entry.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
Does Portraitor store my chat history?
No. The policy says the content of your conversation is not stored, that it is held only for as long as generation requires, and that it is discarded once your portrait has been produced. It also says conversation text is never written to the database, the backups or the logs. The one qualification the policy makes itself is a temporary file used to assemble a very large upload, which is consumed and deleted.
Can anyone at Portraitor read my conversation?
The policy says no one at Portraitor can read your conversation or your portrait, and that no administrative function is able to read either. It also says the portrait is delivered to you alone and is not retained.
Does the AI company keep my conversation?
For a limited period, yes. The policy says the analysis provider retains submitted content in order to monitor misuse of its own service and that Portraitor is unable to disable that. It also says that under the terms of the tier used, the provider does not use the content to train or improve its models and does not review it for that purpose.
Are the photos in my chat export uploaded?
No. The policy says photographs, videos and voice recordings are never opened and never transmitted, and that only the written messages are read, on your device, with only their masked text sent.
Do I need an account to use it?
No. The policy says the Service operates no user accounts. A single portrait can be bought as a guest, and a Pass is an anonymous code that the policy says is not associated with a name or an email address.
One part of that list the policy answers precisely is what becomes of an upload nobody comes back to. What happens if you close the tab follows the fifteen minute window it describes.
The same question asked across several services rather than one gives a sharper answer, because the published positions differ more than the marketing does. Most private chat analyser lines up WhatsAnalyze, Portraitor and LoveGraft on who can reach your conversation besides you.
The useful answer is not a yes or a no. It is a list of what moves off your device and what stays on it, and the policy publishes both halves of that list.
The masking runs before anything is sent.
Names, numbers and addresses are replaced in your own browser first. $10 for a single portrait, no account.
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