When Disability Disclosure Travels: Memory, Privacy, and Contextual Integrity in Conversational AI
Abstract: Conversational AI assistants remember what people tell them, and for disabled people, that often includes disability. We interviewed 12 adults with disabilities in the United States who use LLM-based assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini about when, how, and why they disclose disability to these systems and how this compares with disclosing to people. Using contextual integrity as an analytic lens, we found that participants disclosed by need rather than by name, translating disability into task-scoped instructions; that the same disclosure was judged against two recipients, a non-judging interlocutor and a data-holding company, producing opposite norms; and that memory features relieved the burden of repeated disclosure while letting disability information drift into contexts where it did not belong. Participants did extensive boundary work to restore context and wanted control over scope, provenance, retention, and access rather than per-utterance toggles. We discuss implications for the design of conversational AI assistants.