Tracing Users' Privacy Concerns Across the Lifecycle of a Romantic AI Companion

Abstract: Romantic AI chatbots have quickly attracted users, but their emotional use raises concerns about privacy and safety. As people turn to these systems for intimacy, comfort, and emotionally significant interaction, they often disclose highly sensitive information. Yet the privacy implications of such disclosure remain poorly understood in platforms shaped by persistence, intimacy, and opaque data practices. In this paper, we examine public Reddit discussions about privacy in romantic AI chatbot ecosystems through a lifecycle lens. Analyzing 2,909 posts from 79 subreddits collected over one year, we identify four recurring patterns: disproportionate entry requirements, intensified sensitivity in intimate use, interpretive uncertainty and perceived surveillance, and irreversibility, persistence, and user burden. We show that privacy in romantic AI is best understood as an evolving socio-technical governance problem spanning access, disclosure, interpretation, retention, and exit. These findings highlight the need for privacy and safety governance in romantic AI that is staged across the lifecycle of use, supports meaningful reversibility, and accounts for the emotional vulnerability of intimate human-AI interaction.