4 ms·

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 ri

• 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
            Lol yes we've been warning people about that for years.
        • 9dev 1y ago
          Yes, you do indeed need to be technical to understand that. The tech industry, and that includes most of us here (especially all the FAANG people that curiously always stay silent in threads like this one), has worked very hard to make everyone believe that online privacy is a thing, while working even harder to undermine that at every possible step. Ordinary people expect stuff that they don't actively share with others to stay private. Rightly so! It's the ad industry that got it wrong, not the People.
          • whatevertrevor 1y ago
            The FAANG people also have a lot of direct personal experience contradicting a lot of mainstream FUD titled "All your data is being sold to the lowest bidder". Having worked at one of those companies (and having quit that job being disillusioned by a lot of things), there is still so much mainstream misinformation about this. Yes data is often used for tracking and training. In aggregate form. Sensitive data is anonymized/de-id-ed. The leading research on these techniques are also coming out from these companies btw. There are layers and layers of policy and permission safeguards before you're allowed to access user data directly as an engineer. And if/when someone tries to exploit the legitimate pathways to touch user data (say customer support), they get promptly fired. But it's much easier to believe that FAANG is some great monolithic evil, out to surveil you personally for some vague benefit that never gets specified. All the legitimate concrete monetary benefits (e.g. tracking for ad targeting work and training ML models) can be had just as well with aggregate data, but privacy FUD doesn't want to listen to that. Meanwhile stupid legislation and the ability of courts and law-enforcement to subpoena any data they want whenever they want keeps data on their servers longer than they'd want to. Yet people will prefer to blame the "Evil Tech Cartel" instead of multiple branches of their government wanting to read their texts and GPS logs.
            • 9dev 1y ago
              > All your data is being sold to the lowest bidder There aren't that many possibilities on how geolocation data vendors get access to high-precision location data of millions of people. A publicly traded company that generates revenue from targeted ads can never be fully trusted to behave. A social network that optimizes for time spent looking at ads will never really care about its users well-being. Algorithmic feeds are responsible for a widening social divide and loneliness. Highly detailed behavioral analysis can hurt people even when aggregated, for example when they get less favorable insurance terms based on their spending habits. Data that can be used to increase revenue will not be left untouched just to keep moral higher ground. Sensitive information shared with an LLM that end up in training data today might have dangerous consequences tomorrow, there is no way to know yet. This isn't even about proper handling of individual pieces of data, but the higher-order effects of handing control over both the world's information and the attention of its inhabitations to shareholder-backed mega-corporations. There are perverse incentives at play here, and anyone engaging in this game carries responsibility for the outcome.
        • BeFlatXIII 1y ago
          Imagine treating the 3rd party doctrine as legitimate instead of a misruling.
        • ryanjshaw 1y ago
          My doctor’s notes aren’t on my computer. Does that mean I should expect them to pop up on the internet?
      • Xelbair 1y ago
        because technical people are aware that anything you type over the internet isn't private unless e2e encrypted.
        • cced 1y ago
          This is silly. The second e in e2e is the one compelled to provide the info. Has nothing to do with e2e, even if it’s encrypted at rest, they’ll likely be forced to decrypt.
          • const_cast 1y ago
            You can't decrypt if you don't have the private keys. I mean, these people aren't Zoom, who keep the same private keys on the same server as your data. We can't handhold these tech giants and baby them. They know better. The data should have never been stored in plaintext. And, if it was or is encrypted, they should never have access to the private keys. Why did they do it? I'm assuming because they got greedy, and they wanted those prompts for their own internal training.
        • TiredOfLife 1y ago
          What do you think ssl does?
          • const_cast 1y ago
            Not that. SSL is just transport-layer encryption, once the information is on the server it's plaintext. Everything uses SSL or, more accurately, TLS. Very few things are E2EE. Consider Signal - is Signal equivalent to Whatsapp because Whatsapp using TLS? Of course not. If you have data in plaintext on a server, you should always assume that data lives forever. You might be wrong sometimes, rarely. But usually it does live forever. Most delete buttons don't even actually delete anything.
  • portaouflop 1y ago
    If I want private i run the LLM on my machine. Everything else should be considered public basically
    • Attrecomet 1y ago
      There are different levels of privacy. I can expect data I share with a company for a specific use case to not be public knowledge, yes.
      • msgodel 1y ago
        Absolutely not. If they get subpoenaed (as is the case here) they have no choice but to share it.
        • ryanjshaw 1y ago
          Isn’t that the point of this thread - people are questioning whether the scope of this subpoena is excessive?
      • const_cast 1y ago
        You can't expect that when major data breaches happen all the time. Even assuming a perfectly benevolent company, that means nothing. Just them having the data is a liability. Which is why Rule Number 1 of data security is: have the least data.
  • dakiol 1y ago
    As much as our emails are. So, I don’t know.
    • Attrecomet 1y ago
      It's not like we expect any newspaper in the world to get access to all of our emails, same with these chat logs: we should expect them to be private in this context.
  • Attrecomet 1y ago
    The email simile someone else used here is pretty good: image the NYT would have gotten access to all emails stored and processed by gmail. That's a pretty invasive court order!
  • barrkel 1y ago
    Sure, if you pay for the product, the expectation is that the data is not used for training, because that's what the contract says. And if you have a temporary chat, the data will be deleted after a day or two.
    • msgodel 1y ago
      Paying for it doesn't change that the data is on their server.
• johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Sure, courts have the power to subpoena for a lot of stuff. I don't really see the concern though: courts also can redact a lot of sensitive information when it releases the case (see Epic v. Apple, lots of unannounced titles and deals we learned of, and just as many redacted). >It's not going to stop the rise of LLMs. Disney might, though. I think few want to "stop the rise of LLM's", though. I personally just want the 3 C's the be followed: credit, consent, compensation. If it costs a billion dollars to compensate all willing parties to train on their data: good. If someone doesn't want their data trained on it no matter how big the paycheck: also good. I don't know why that's such a hot take (well. that's rhetorical. I've had many a comment here unironically wanting to end copyright as a concept). That's how every other media company has had to do things.
  • dmurray 1y ago
    > Sure, courts have the power to subpoena for a lot of stuff. I don't really see the concern though: courts also can redact a lot of sensitive information when it releases the case (see Epic v. Apple, lots of unannounced titles and deals we learned of, and just as many redacted). It's not the public reading the information I'd concerned about, it's every data-hungry corporation that manages to file a lawsuit. The courts put a lot of trust in lawyers: they'll redact the sensitive information from me and you, but take the view that lawyers are "officers of the court" and get to make copies of anything they convince the court to drag into evidence. But those officers of the court actually work for the same data-harvesting companies and have minimal oversight regarding what they share with them.
    • soco 1y ago
      And then we're just one hacker away from having the entire heap on the big internet.
  • elpocko 1y ago
    >I've had many a comment here unironically wanting to end copyright as a concept I mean, the site's name is Hacker News after all, even though so many of the "hackers" here are confessing their love for Intellectual Property and Copyright law, and everybody chanting the well-known slogan "Information wants to be proprietary!".
• stefan_ 1y ago
  Maybe instead of making up absurd conspiracy theories about "the right judge" and "very strange news" you should recognize that this is proceeding as any other civil suit and that if you want to have privacy in the personal data you unload with OpenAI and other untrustworthy parties, you should call your representative to change the law. Until then all your "nuclear bomb sized" chats are effectively the same as the dinner bill for Sam courting Huang to get more of those GPUs.
  • Tadpole9181 1y ago
    If someone sued Gmail for assisting with piracy and demanded every single email from every single customer, then said, "especially the ones your customers wanted private/deleted", a judge would say that it is an absurd breach of privacy for (hundreds of) millions of Americans. I fully expect these chats from discovery to be leaked, token, or show up in the form of analytics in a NYY expose.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• tzs 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 Just to be clear, what NY Times lawyers means in this situation is the outside lawyers that the Times has hired to litigate this case. Lawyers that actually work at the Times won't get access. Not will non-lawyers who work at the Times. The outside lawyers might also hire experts to help them understand and assess the information. Those experts might get access subject to court approval. ChatGPT would have a chance to challenge the choice of experts. The way access works typically is that the lawyers for the side providing the data (ChatGPT in this case) will set aside a room in their offices (or someplace they've rented specifically for this litigation) that contains a computer and storage with all the data, does not have internet access, and is locked. The other side has to come and be let into the room to look at the data, and can't take copies with them when they leave.