LiveRamp expands ChatGPT partnership: What happens to data?

The data and analytics platform LiveRamp is further expanding its partnership with ChatGPT. This has consequences for the data of ChatGPT users – but unfortunately, it’s not clear which ones.

LiveRamp is a company from the data trading ecosystem. Among other things, it offers its customers the ability to process their user data, trade it, and reach new or existing customers elsewhere based on that data.

LiveRamp has been working with OpenAI since June 2026. Previously, the focus was primarily on measuring the success of advertisements that ChatGPT itself has assigned to customers. Simply put: A specialist retailer for musical instruments handed over its ad for new guitar strings to ChatGPT, and the chatbot showed it to users it deemed suitable – for example, because they were asking ChatGPT questions about guitars at the time. The specialist retailer could then evaluate the success of this advertising via LiveRamp.

Targeted targeting is now also possible

Now, the collaboration is going a step further, as described in LiveRamp’s blog post, among others. For example, companies can now use LiveRamp to specifically target their ads for guitar strings to all those ChatGPT users who have previously bought a guitar from them. To achieve this, the company sends a list of its target customers, which they likely already manage via LiveRamp anyway (numerous companies and platforms use this provider to manage their customer data (including yours)), to ChatGPT. This compares the data with that of its customers. Are there any overlaps?

According to LiveRamp’s post, the matching is done via LiveRamp’s proprietary RampID number. This is a kind of pseudonymous identification number that the company assigns to all of us and which uniquely identifies us as we move around the internet – unless we take appropriate protective measures. If there are hits of significant size, the advertisement is displayed to the targeted ChatGPT users.

It is unclear what data is involved

This means that more data from all sorts of companies is definitely flowing to OpenAI. According to OpenAI, companies themselves do not know which individual customers are using ChatGPT, but they do see approximate hit quantities. However, it is unclear exactly who receives which data and whether OpenAI, the companies, and LiveRamp store and further process the additional information about their users. It only becomes clear once again: OpenAI has embarked on the path to becoming a “data octopus”.

The feature is initially being rolled out in eleven countries and will be gradually available wherever ChatGPT is available. OpenAI has been steadily expanding its advertising business this year since the launch of ads below ChatGPT responses in February. They are now also available in Asia, and OpenAI is further developing the feature: Users will be able to contact sponsored AI agents directly by clicking on an ad to answer further questions.

(rie)