Computer History: ChatGPT now remembers your activity — except in France (for now)

Since August 13, 2026, OpenAI has been rolling out a feature called "Computer History" on the ChatGPT desktop app for Mac: it turns a user’s activity — actions inside their apps and websites — into a searchable memory the assistant can draw on for context, according to ChatGPT’s official release notes and several outlets that tested it after launch. It replaces "Chronicle," the research preview OpenAI shipped a few months earlier, with lower token usage and added privacy controls. It is available immediately on Pro, Business and Enterprise plans in most markets — but not in France: OpenAI has explicitly delayed the rollout in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland "in the coming weeks," with no firm date given as of this writing.

What Computer History actually does

The feature is opt-in: a user chooses which apps and websites contribute to their history, can pause collection at any time, and can delete specific sessions or everything at once. It records interaction events, not screenshots, screen recordings or audio, and private browsing is excluded by design. The resulting memory and timeline feed both ChatGPT and Codex, letting them pick up where a user left off or suggest skills and scheduled tasks for work that repeats — the same logic OpenAI is pushing across its product line toward an assistant that keeps context rather than starting from zero each session.

Why Europe is waiting

A feature designed to capture what a user does across every app and website on their machine runs straight into the GDPR’s data minimisation principle: personal data collected must be adequate, relevant and limited to what is strictly necessary for a defined purpose — not gathered "just in case," as the CNIL’s own guidance sheet on minimising data collection puts it. A staggered rollout — global first, EEA/UK/Switzerland later — has become a familiar pattern for AI features that touch personal data broadly rather than narrowly, and the delay itself is a signal: a vendor is still working out consent granularity, retention limits and access rights before it will stand behind the feature under European law. The underlying concern is not new: a 2024 study by Paul Glavin, Alex Bierman and Scott Schieman, Private Eyes, They See Your Every Move: Workplace Surveillance and Worker Well-Being, published in Work and Occupations, found that perceived surveillance at work is linked to higher psychological distress and lower job satisfaction, largely through reduced autonomy — a finding that applies whether the monitoring is framed as management oversight or, as here, as a personal productivity feature.

What it means for your SME

The regulatory delay should not be read as "nothing to do until it reaches France." An employee running a personal ChatGPT Pro subscription set to English, or a non-EU account, could plausibly switch Computer History on before the feature is officially available to French users — a new entry point for shadow IT: client information visible on screen, documents open in other software, a background email client, all of it can feed an AI memory that no one at the company authorized or oversees. This is exactly the kind of change a dedicated operations-watch or regulatory-watch agent is built to catch for an SME — flagging a vendor’s product change before it touches your data, rather than your team reading about it after the fact in the press.

Concrete steps

• →Inventory the ChatGPT accounts your teams use — Pro, Business, Enterprise and free — including any subscribed personally on company devices.
• →If you run ChatGPT Business or Enterprise, ask your OpenAI contact whether Computer History can be disabled or restricted at the organization level once it reaches Europe.
• →Update your AI usage charter to explicitly cover "activity memory" features before they reach employee workstations, not after.
• →Hand off tracking of this kind of vendor announcement to a dedicated regulatory-watch agent rather than relying on occasional press reading — product updates now ship faster than any quarterly review cycle.
• →Make clear that a vendor’s "opt-in" is not the same as company authorization: switching on an activity-memory feature must stay an IT governance decision, never an individual employee’s choice in their personal settings.

Computer History will likely reach France within weeks, with safeguards adapted to GDPR. But the delay itself is useful information: it signals that a vendor is already building, elsewhere, a memory of everything its users do on their computer — and a French SME that waits for the official rollout to start caring is always reacting a step too late.