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.

翻译：浪漫AI聊天机器人迅速吸引了用户，但其情感化使用引发了对隐私和安全的担忧。当人们转向这些系统寻求亲密感、慰藉和情感意义丰富的互动时，他们往往披露高度敏感的信息。然而，在由持久性、亲密性和不透明数据实践所塑造的平台中，此类披露的隐私影响仍未被充分理解。本文通过生命周期视角审视Reddit上关于浪漫AI聊天机器人生态系统中隐私的公开讨论。经分析一年间从79个子论坛收集的2,909篇帖子，我们识别出四种反复出现的模式：不均衡的准入要求、亲密使用中强化的敏感性、解释性不确定性与感知到的监视、以及不可逆性、持久性与用户负担。我们指出，浪漫AI中的隐私最好被理解为一个跨越访问、披露、解释、保留和退出等环节的动态社会技术治理问题。这些发现强调，浪漫AI的隐私与安全治理应贯穿使用生命周期的各个阶段，支持有意义的可逆性，并考量亲密人机交互中的情感脆弱性。