4 ms·

The New York Times wants your private ChatGPT history – even the deleted parts

61 points by isolli 1y ago

aucisson_masque 1y ago
don't know if the Times is such the bad guy that this article presents, imo the justice system in the USA has always been that way. They don't care how extravagant one request is or how little it makes sense so long as you got money and lawyer to push it. I guess people could switch to one of the many chatgpt competitor that isn't being forced to give away your personal chat. Don't even know what the time is trying to achieve now, the cat is out of the bag with LLM. Even if a judge ruled that chatgpt and other must give royalties to the time for each request, what about the ones running locally on joe's computer or in countries that don't care about American justice at all.
- bilekas 1y ago
  Yeah, the headline is a little bit rage bait. There are countless disclosure requests that happen every day that could be spun to say "X wants your messages from Meta, Twitter etc" Well yeah, this isn't something new. Infact I see it being hard to defend for OpenAI to basically say "Well yes, its standard practice to hand over any potential evidence, but no we're not doing that". As for the deleted data, I wonder if legally there are obligations NOT to delete data ?
  - Tadpole9181 1y ago
    This isn't a targeted request for one user's Facebook messages. This is a request for every Facebook user's message. And when they don't hand over private DMs, they point and go "especially those, you're obviously hiding something by not giving us the most sensitive user data you have". It is an absurd breach of user privacy at the scale of tens of millions of Americans that goes well beyond the reasonability for a civil copyright lawsuit. This sets the precedence that if Gmail gets sued for privacy, now all our emails are leaked. Télécom companies? All of our text messages. Cloud image storage? Woops, gotta hand us every photo any American has taken with a Samsung phone! After all, it might have content that infringes on my copyright!
- hotep99 1y ago
  They're knowingly contributing to abuse of the discovery process to violate privacy and drive the cost of litigation through the roof. They're absolutely bad guys along with the justice system itself.
  - louthy 1y ago
    > They're knowingly contributing to abuse of the discovery process to violate privacy Are they? Are you speculating or do you know something we don’t? It seems that if the NYT want to know whether ChatGPT has been producing copyrighted material, that they own, verbatim, and also understand the scale of the abuse, then they would need to see the logs. People shouldn’t be surprised, that a company that flouts the law (regardless of what they think of those laws) for its own financial gain, might end up with its collected data in a legal discovery. It’s evidence.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >Even if a judge ruled that chatgpt and other must give royalties to the time for each request You don't think that's a victory in and of itself for a business? Also, you don't need to worry about drug users if you take out the dealer. the users will eventually dry up.
- bux93 1y ago
  The justice systems hasn't always been quite like this. It's not business as usual for some lawsuit to force a SAAS provider to turn over every scrap of data they stored, even the deleted data, on the off chance it might contain something infringing. Well, maybe it's business as usual now. A lot of things that were previously considered obvious overreach by corporates and goverment are now depicted as "business as usual" in the US.
pu_pe 1y ago
> The Times argued that people who delete their ChatGPT conversations are more likely to have committed copyright infringement. And as Stein put it in the hearing, it’s simple “logic” that “[i]f you think you’re doing something wrong, you’re going to want that to be deleted.” My most generous guess here is that the NYT is accusing OpenAI of deleting infringing user chats themselves, because the implication that someone would delete their history due to fear of copyright infringement is completely stupid.
- shakna 1y ago
  It seems like an obvious take here. They were asked to preserve their logs, to prevent them from deleting incriminating information. Which is... Par for the course. But OpenAI are desperately trying to spin it that the logs should not be allowed into evidence.
  - senko 1y ago
    "Logs" sounds innocous, "private data" appearing in those chats is much worse. As a citizen of an EU country, I do not view trampling on my rights, directly violating my country's laws and reneging on published privacy policy (all of which OpenAI is being forced to in this case by keeping the data) to be "par for the course".
    - shakna 1y ago
      "Logs" is what is in the order. If OpenAI have already been violating your rights, by putting private information into the logs, then your beef is with them, not the courts for preserving data. > Accordingly, OpenAI is NOW DIRECTED to preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying), whether such data might be deleted at a user’s request or because of “numerous privacy laws and regulations” that might require OpenAI to do so. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.640396/gov.uscourts.nysd.640396.551.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.64...
amelius 1y ago
_Especially_ the deleted parts >:)
profsummergig 1y ago
This is a nuclear bomb sized development if it's true that all ChatGPT chats will be released to NYTimes lawyers to comb through. It's not going to stop the rise of LLMs. But one should expect it to cause a lot of very strange news in the next couple of years (lawful leaks [i.e. "discovery"], unlawful leaks, unintended leaks, etc.). The Justice system (pretty much anywhere) is amenable to being incentivized. It looks like NYT has found the right judge (take that how you will).
- msgodel 1y ago
  Was anyone really thinking of those as private?
  - Xelbair 1y ago
    Unfortunately yes, by a lot of non-technical people.
    - cced 1y ago
      Why does it have to be about being technical or not? You’re signed into an account with no obvious social networking capabilities, what about chatgpt screams “this will be public chat between me and an llm” ?..
      - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago
        It's not your computer so of course it isn't private. Apparently you do need to be technical to understand that.
        amelius 1y ago
        So basically, everything that happens on an iPhone is not private?
        msgodel 1y ago
6510 1y ago
It seems time to add the Times to the lists of blocked domains. If the US court thinks their data is so sensitive* everyone in the world should give up their privacy for it it would be better if no one (outside the US) has access to this sensitive* data. * not sure what the right word is
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Isn't the Times blocking you already? I believe they paywall their articles.
  - 6510 1y ago
    You can buy your way though. If in doing so I have to forfeit my right to be forgotten with a 3rd party it looks like I would end up in an agreement that isn't legal in the EU.
- whatevertrevor 1y ago
  Re sensitive: precious or valuable?
iamnotagenius 1y ago
[dead]
sroussey 1y ago
Anyone else been asking ChatGPT vulgar sexual stuff about NYT lawyers and also adding “free content” “NYT” etc so it pops up in their search?
elcapitan 1y ago
Just deleted a ChatGPT conversation about creative insults for NYT lawyers so that they get to read it in the future.
unstatusthequo 1y ago
Adding to the reasons I distrust mainstream media, especially that particular one. They should get over themselves. They aren’t all that. Typical obnoxious New York attitude. I hope for everyone’s sake that OpenAI’s lawyers can absolutely crush the NYT. I think NYT is just after cash since their shitty industry is dying. Their demise wouldn’t bother me a bit.
- SamaIsMyHero 1y ago
  >I hope for everyone’s sake that OpenAI’s lawyers can absolutely crush the NYT >I hope for everyone’s sake that OpenAI’s lawyers >I hope for everyone’s sake that OpenAI
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- SamaIsMyHero 1y ago
  >I don't understand the willingness of the masses to willingly give governments complete access to all of their transaction data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43628278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43628278 How much conversation data have you shared with OpenAI to date?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
thaumasiotes 1y ago
Huh, Google doesn't even show your Gemini history to you. It's supposedly saved, but the "history" can change over time, suggesting that it's regenerated (some of the time?) when you look at it.
PeterStuer 1y ago
"This is the newspaper that won a Pulitzer for exposing domestic wiretapping in the Bush era" The current NYT is about as far away from that past as you can get. These days they would be writing column after column inciting the whistleblower should be locked up for live as a domestic terrorist.
- spacemadness 1y ago
  Watching them skewer Bernie Sanders was eye opening. I get not endorsing him, but it was far beyond that and was not measured journalism. They worked over time to discredit him. They are the poster child for neoliberalism.
atsjie 1y ago
Is this enforcable in the EU? Not allowing a user to delete their data must be in violation of GDPR I imagine (although I'm no expert)?
- bluecalm 1y ago
  There are exceptions. For example I can't remove your name, address, IP address and other data if my tax authority requires them for VAT identification (if you bought something from me).
- baobun 1y ago
  It seems like they could have been compliant with both by not logging in the first place. Given the choice between not logging chats or violating either EU or US law, it seems pretty clear what the vibe is in OpenAI and the valley these days. (no expert on GDPR as applicable to this order either, though)
kleiba 1y ago
> But last week, in a Manhattan courtroom, a federal judge ruled that OpenAI must preserve nearly every exchange its users have ever had with ChatGPT — even conversations the users had deleted. Interesting. Does this imply that OpenAI needs to distinguish between users in the EU who absolutely have a right to have personal information deleted (like, really, actually deleted) and users in the US?
- Tadpole9181 1y ago
  Bold to assume the US court system or NYT give a single rat's ass about EU law or the rights of people.
  - kleiba 1y ago
    It's not so much about the US court system, but if OpenAI offers their service/product to people in the EU, it must abide by EU law.
xdennis 1y ago
The opinion contribution is obviously taking the side of Open AI by spreading FUD. The whole piece is basically "do you really trust the evil New York Times with the data you entrusted to us, the honorable techbros of Open AI?". I don't think people trust OpenAI nor NYT. But if you did trust OpenAI with your sensitive data, NYT isn't going to be more nefarious with it that OpenAI already is.
lupusreal 1y ago
The NYTimes wants user chat logs, not because they seriously think users are using ChatGPT to pirate NYTimes articles, but because they want to comb through all those logs for anything juicy to make content for their tabloid rag. "10 Things You Won't Believe Senator's Aides Asked ChatGPT!"
- gaws 1y ago
  The data that will be used during the analysis is probably anonymized.
rickard 1y ago
As another commenter noted, I don’t trust NYT’s lawyers with my chats any less than OpenAI, but spreading private data should be limited as far as possible. I just cancelled my NYT subscription because of their actions, detailing the reason for doing so. It’s a very small action, but the best I can do right now.
- gaws 1y ago
  > spreading private data should be limited as far as possible. The NYT making the logs public is extremely unlikely.
  - tzs 1y ago
    ...especially since no NYT employees will even see them. They will only be seen by outside lawyers the Times contracts with to handle the litigation, and maybe some outside experts those lawyers hire. The people who do see them won't even describe anything they see in them to Times employees. Times employees won't see much more than what you or I will be able to see by reading public court filings and attending hearings and the trial (if it gets that far) in person. Courts have been dealing with highly confidential and sensitive information in discovery for decades (the present system used in federal litigation has been around since 1938) and take care to limit access.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44450294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44450294
wendy4151 1y ago
[dead]

61 points by isolli 1y ago

don't know if the Times is such the bad guy that this article presents, imo the justice system in the USA has always been that way. They don't care how extravagant one request is or how little it makes sense so long as you got money and lawyer to push it. I guess people could switch to one of the many chatgpt competitor that isn't being forced to give away your personal chat. Don't even know what the time is trying to achieve now, the cat is out of the bag with LLM. Even if a judge ruled that chatgpt and other must give royalties to the time for each request, what about the ones running locally on joe's computer or in countries that don't care about American justice at all.

bilekas 1y ago
Yeah, the headline is a little bit rage bait. There are countless disclosure requests that happen every day that could be spun to say "X wants your messages from Meta, Twitter etc" Well yeah, this isn't something new. Infact I see it being hard to defend for OpenAI to basically say "Well yes, its standard practice to hand over any potential evidence, but no we're not doing that". As for the deleted data, I wonder if legally there are obligations NOT to delete data ?
- Tadpole9181 1y ago
  This isn't a targeted request for one user's Facebook messages. This is a request for every Facebook user's message. And when they don't hand over private DMs, they point and go "especially those, you're obviously hiding something by not giving us the most sensitive user data you have". It is an absurd breach of user privacy at the scale of tens of millions of Americans that goes well beyond the reasonability for a civil copyright lawsuit. This sets the precedence that if Gmail gets sued for privacy, now all our emails are leaked. Télécom companies? All of our text messages. Cloud image storage? Woops, gotta hand us every photo any American has taken with a Samsung phone! After all, it might have content that infringes on my copyright!
hotep99 1y ago
They're knowingly contributing to abuse of the discovery process to violate privacy and drive the cost of litigation through the roof. They're absolutely bad guys along with the justice system itself.
- louthy 1y ago
  > They're knowingly contributing to abuse of the discovery process to violate privacy Are they? Are you speculating or do you know something we don’t? It seems that if the NYT want to know whether ChatGPT has been producing copyrighted material, that they own, verbatim, and also understand the scale of the abuse, then they would need to see the logs. People shouldn’t be surprised, that a company that flouts the law (regardless of what they think of those laws) for its own financial gain, might end up with its collected data in a legal discovery. It’s evidence.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
>Even if a judge ruled that chatgpt and other must give royalties to the time for each request You don't think that's a victory in and of itself for a business? Also, you don't need to worry about drug users if you take out the dealer. the users will eventually dry up.
bux93 1y ago
The justice systems hasn't always been quite like this. It's not business as usual for some lawsuit to force a SAAS provider to turn over every scrap of data they stored, even the deleted data, on the off chance it might contain something infringing. Well, maybe it's business as usual now. A lot of things that were previously considered obvious overreach by corporates and goverment are now depicted as "business as usual" in the US.

pu_pe 1y ago

> The Times argued that people who delete their ChatGPT conversations are more likely to have committed copyright infringement. And as Stein put it in the hearing, it’s simple “logic” that “[i]f you think you’re doing something wrong, you’re going to want that to be deleted.” My most generous guess here is that the NYT is accusing OpenAI of deleting infringing user chats themselves, because the implication that someone would delete their history due to fear of copyright infringement is completely stupid.

shakna 1y ago
It seems like an obvious take here. They were asked to preserve their logs, to prevent them from deleting incriminating information. Which is... Par for the course. But OpenAI are desperately trying to spin it that the logs should not be allowed into evidence.
- senko 1y ago
  "Logs" sounds innocous, "private data" appearing in those chats is much worse. As a citizen of an EU country, I do not view trampling on my rights, directly violating my country's laws and reneging on published privacy policy (all of which OpenAI is being forced to in this case by keeping the data) to be "par for the course".
  - shakna 1y ago
    "Logs" is what is in the order. If OpenAI have already been violating your rights, by putting private information into the logs, then your beef is with them, not the courts for preserving data. > Accordingly, OpenAI is NOW DIRECTED to preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying), whether such data might be deleted at a user’s request or because of “numerous privacy laws and regulations” that might require OpenAI to do so. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.640396/gov.uscourts.nysd.640396.551.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.64...

amelius 1y ago

_Especially_ the deleted parts >:)

profsummergig 1y ago

This is a nuclear bomb sized development if it's true that all ChatGPT chats will be released to NYTimes lawyers to comb through. It's not going to stop the rise of LLMs. But one should expect it to cause a lot of very strange news in the next couple of years (lawful leaks [i.e. "discovery"], unlawful leaks, unintended leaks, etc.). The Justice system (pretty much anywhere) is amenable to being incentivized. It looks like NYT has found the right judge (take that how you will).

msgodel 1y ago
Was anyone really thinking of those as private?
- Xelbair 1y ago
  Unfortunately yes, by a lot of non-technical people.
  - cced 1y ago
    Why does it have to be about being technical or not? You’re signed into an account with no obvious social networking capabilities, what about chatgpt screams “this will be public chat between me and an llm” ?..
    - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago
      It's not your computer so of course it isn't private. Apparently you do need to be technical to understand that.
      - amelius 1y ago
        So basically, everything that happens on an iPhone is not private?
        msgodel 1y ago

6510 1y ago

It seems time to add the Times to the lists of blocked domains. If the US court thinks their data is so sensitive* everyone in the world should give up their privacy for it it would be better if no one (outside the US) has access to this sensitive* data. * not sure what the right word is

johnnyanmac 1y ago
Isn't the Times blocking you already? I believe they paywall their articles.
- 6510 1y ago
  You can buy your way though. If in doing so I have to forfeit my right to be forgotten with a 3rd party it looks like I would end up in an agreement that isn't legal in the EU.
whatevertrevor 1y ago
Re sensitive: precious or valuable?

iamnotagenius 1y ago

[dead]

sroussey 1y ago

Anyone else been asking ChatGPT vulgar sexual stuff about NYT lawyers and also adding “free content” “NYT” etc so it pops up in their search?

elcapitan 1y ago

Just deleted a ChatGPT conversation about creative insults for NYT lawyers so that they get to read it in the future.

unstatusthequo 1y ago

Adding to the reasons I distrust mainstream media, especially that particular one. They should get over themselves. They aren’t all that. Typical obnoxious New York attitude. I hope for everyone’s sake that OpenAI’s lawyers can absolutely crush the NYT. I think NYT is just after cash since their shitty industry is dying. Their demise wouldn’t bother me a bit.

SamaIsMyHero 1y ago
>I hope for everyone’s sake that OpenAI’s lawyers can absolutely crush the NYT >I hope for everyone’s sake that OpenAI’s lawyers >I hope for everyone’s sake that OpenAI
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
SamaIsMyHero 1y ago
>I don't understand the willingness of the masses to willingly give governments complete access to all of their transaction data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43628278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43628278 How much conversation data have you shared with OpenAI to date?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

thaumasiotes 1y ago

Huh, Google doesn't even show your Gemini history to you. It's supposedly saved, but the "history" can change over time, suggesting that it's regenerated (some of the time?) when you look at it.

PeterStuer 1y ago

"This is the newspaper that won a Pulitzer for exposing domestic wiretapping in the Bush era" The current NYT is about as far away from that past as you can get. These days they would be writing column after column inciting the whistleblower should be locked up for live as a domestic terrorist.

spacemadness 1y ago
Watching them skewer Bernie Sanders was eye opening. I get not endorsing him, but it was far beyond that and was not measured journalism. They worked over time to discredit him. They are the poster child for neoliberalism.

atsjie 1y ago

Is this enforcable in the EU? Not allowing a user to delete their data must be in violation of GDPR I imagine (although I'm no expert)?

bluecalm 1y ago
There are exceptions. For example I can't remove your name, address, IP address and other data if my tax authority requires them for VAT identification (if you bought something from me).
baobun 1y ago
It seems like they could have been compliant with both by not logging in the first place. Given the choice between not logging chats or violating either EU or US law, it seems pretty clear what the vibe is in OpenAI and the valley these days. (no expert on GDPR as applicable to this order either, though)

kleiba 1y ago

> But last week, in a Manhattan courtroom, a federal judge ruled that OpenAI must preserve nearly every exchange its users have ever had with ChatGPT — even conversations the users had deleted. Interesting. Does this imply that OpenAI needs to distinguish between users in the EU who absolutely have a right to have personal information deleted (like, really, actually deleted) and users in the US?

Tadpole9181 1y ago
Bold to assume the US court system or NYT give a single rat's ass about EU law or the rights of people.
- kleiba 1y ago
  It's not so much about the US court system, but if OpenAI offers their service/product to people in the EU, it must abide by EU law.

xdennis 1y ago

The opinion contribution is obviously taking the side of Open AI by spreading FUD. The whole piece is basically "do you really trust the evil New York Times with the data you entrusted to us, the honorable techbros of Open AI?". I don't think people trust OpenAI nor NYT. But if you did trust OpenAI with your sensitive data, NYT isn't going to be more nefarious with it that OpenAI already is.

lupusreal 1y ago

The NYTimes wants user chat logs, not because they seriously think users are using ChatGPT to pirate NYTimes articles, but because they want to comb through all those logs for anything juicy to make content for their tabloid rag. "10 Things You Won't Believe Senator's Aides Asked ChatGPT!"

gaws 1y ago
The data that will be used during the analysis is probably anonymized.

rickard 1y ago

As another commenter noted, I don’t trust NYT’s lawyers with my chats any less than OpenAI, but spreading private data should be limited as far as possible. I just cancelled my NYT subscription because of their actions, detailing the reason for doing so. It’s a very small action, but the best I can do right now.

gaws 1y ago
> spreading private data should be limited as far as possible. The NYT making the logs public is extremely unlikely.
- tzs 1y ago
  ...especially since no NYT employees will even see them. They will only be seen by outside lawyers the Times contracts with to handle the litigation, and maybe some outside experts those lawyers hire. The people who do see them won't even describe anything they see in them to Times employees. Times employees won't see much more than what you or I will be able to see by reading public court filings and attending hearings and the trial (if it gets that far) in person. Courts have been dealing with highly confidential and sensitive information in discovery for decades (the present system used in federal litigation has been around since 1938) and take care to limit access.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44450294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44450294

wendy4151 1y ago

[dead]