Anyone who has handed a phone to a friend, a child or a colleague knows the small panic that follows: what is still open on the screen? For many people, the answer now includes ChatGPT, where health worries, money questions and half-written messages sit in plain view in the sidebar.
On Tuesday, October 20, OpenAI began rolling out a fix. A new feature called Locked Chats lets you move selected conversations out of your normal history and behind a four-digit PIN, or Face ID and Touch ID on supported phones.
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Locked chats live in their own section, hidden from your regular history, pinned chats and search. A PIN or biometrics open them. They are not end-to-end encrypted.
How Locked Chats works
Once a chat is locked, it disappears from the main sidebar, from pinned chats and from search results. It moves into a dedicated Locked Chats section that opens only after you enter your PIN or use your phone's biometrics. Unlike a Temporary Chat, which leaves no history at all, a locked chat is saved and can be reopened whenever you like.
According to TechCrunch, OpenAI describes the feature as designed for personal conversations and for moments such as planning a surprise while someone else uses your device. Engadget reports that voice mode also works with locked chats on Android and iOS.
Memory stays separate
The most interesting detail is how Locked Chats treats ChatGPT's Memory feature. If Memory is on, locked chats get their own memory, shared only among the chats in that section. New messages you send there can update that private memory, but they do not update your regular Memory. In practice, a locked conversation about a medical issue should not start shaping the suggestions you see in everyday chats.
OpenAI's help page also notes that anything Memory learned before you locked a chat is not removed by locking it.
What it does not do
OpenAI is direct about the limits, and they matter if you are thinking of this as a vault.
- No end-to-end encryption. Locking limits who can open the chat on your device. It is not a separate encrypted store, and it does not change how OpenAI handles your data.
- Retention and training settings are unchanged. The "Improve the model for everyone" setting and OpenAI's retention rules apply as before.
- A PIN reset deletes everything. Resetting the PIN permanently deletes all locked chats, files and other content protected by the old one. OpenAI says support cannot recover them.
- Some chats cannot be locked. Temporary chats, archived chats, group chats, chats opened from a shared link, chats with scheduled tasks and chats with meeting recordings are excluded. Engadget adds that Codex conversations cannot be locked either.
In short, this is a privacy screen for the people around you, not protection from the company that stores the chats.
Who gets it and when
Locked Chats is rolling out gradually on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu plans, but not on ChatGPT for Healthcare. OpenAI says the option may take a few days to appear in your account, so do not worry if you do not see it yet. TechCrunch and Engadget both report the rollout began on October 20.
This is a long-requested feature. Users had asked for per-chat PIN or Face ID protection in OpenAI's community forums for months, and Android Authority spotted an early version in the Android app in August.
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What this means for you
If you share a phone, laptop or tablet with family, or use ChatGPT on a work device you sometimes hand over, Locked Chats is worth setting up once it reaches your account. Use it for the conversations you would not want a stranger to scroll past, such as health, money, job searches or legal questions.
But treat it as a screen lock, not a safe. Do not paste passwords, API keys or confidential client data into any chat and assume a PIN makes it secure. If you reset your PIN, remember you lose the locked content for good, so keep a copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.
For OpenAI, the move is a sign that AI assistants are becoming places where people keep their most personal thoughts, and that privacy controls are now a feature people expect, not a bonus.
Bottom line: Locked Chats hides your private ChatGPT conversations from whoever picks up your device. It does not hide them from OpenAI, and a forgotten PIN means they are gone.
