14 ms·

Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

• mac3n 11mo ago
  > Trust, security, and privacy guide every product and decision we make. -- openai
  • great_wubwub 11mo ago
    > Trust, security, and privacy guide every product and decision we make except ones that involve money. -- openai, probably.
  • frig57 11mo ago
    Stopped reading at this line
  • gk1 11mo ago
    You know you have a branding problem when (1) you have to say that at the outset, and (2) it induces more eyerolls than a gaggle of golf dads.
    • wkat4242 11mo ago
      The same with Google "don't be evil" these days.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
    - any corporation remember a corporation generally is an object owned by some people. Do you trust "unspecified future group of people" with your privacy? You can't. Best we can do is understand the information architecture and act accordingly.
    • latexr 11mo ago
      > - any corporation I don’t recall seeing many food, furniture, plant, or generally anything not related to tech talking about trust, security, and privacy as guiding principles.
• hlieberman 11mo ago
  An incredibly cynical attempt at spin from a former non-profit that renounced its founding principles. A class act, all around.
• techblueberry 11mo ago
  I’ll trust the people not asking for a Government bailout thank you very much.
• jcranmer 11mo ago
  "How dare the New York Times demand access to our vault of everything-we-keep to figure out if we're a bunch of lying asses. We must resist them in the name of user privacy! Signed, the people who have scraped literally everything to incorporate it into the products we make." OpenAI may be trying to paint themselves as the goody-two-shoes here, but they're not.
  • greyman 11mo ago
    But that vault can contain conversation between me and chatgpt, which I willingly did, but with the expectation that only openai has access to it. Why should some lawyer working for NYT have access to it? OpenAI is precisely correct, no matter what other motives could be there.
    • jcranmer 11mo ago
      https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/ https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/ > We may use Personal Data for the following purposes: [...] To comply with legal obligations and to protect the rights, privacy, safety, or property of our users, OpenAI, or third parties. OpenAI outright says it will give your conversations to people like lawyers. If you thought they wouldn't give it out to third parties, you not only have not read OpenAI's privacy policy, you've not read any privacy policy from a big tech company (because all of them are basically maximalist "your privacy is important, we'll share your data only with us and people who we deem worthy of it, which turns out to be everybody.")
    • mkipper 11mo ago
      > but with the expectation that only openai has access to it You can argue about "the expectation" of privacy all you want, but this is completely detached from reality. My assumption is that almost no third parties I share information with have magic immunity that prevents the information from being used in a legal action involving them. Maybe my doctor? Maybe my lawyer? IANAL but I'm not even confident in those. If I text my friend saying their party last night was great and they're in court later and need to prove their whereabouts that night, I understand that my text is going to be used as evidence. That might be a private conversation, but it's not my data when I send it to someone else and give them permission to store it forever.
• adolph 11mo ago
  Cynicism aside, this seems like an attempt to prune back a potentially excessive legal discovery demand by appealing to public opinion. The New York Times is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private ChatGPT conversations. They claim they might find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall.
  • indoordin0saur 11mo ago
    Yeah, I'm not sure why everyone feels the need to take a side here. Both of these organizations are ghoulish.
    • mmooss 11mo ago
      How is the NYT like OpenAI, or 'ghoulish'?
    • o11c 11mo ago
      The NYT has problems with being a stooge of the military-industrial complex, but I really don't see them doing anything wrong in this case.
• grugagag 11mo ago
  Hypocrisy at best, this wall of text is not even penned by a human and yet they want us to believe they care about user privacy..
• miltonlost 11mo ago
  This is the basic discovery process when OpenAI commits IP theft. They're trying to misinform the public of how justice process works.
  • mapontosevenths 11mo ago
    > To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. The constitution is clear that the purpose of intellectual property is to promote progress. I feel that OpenAI is on the right side of that and this is not IP theft as long as they aren't reproducing others work in a non-transformative way. Training the AI is clearly transformative (and lossy to boot). Giving the AI the ability to scrape and paraphrase others work is less clear and both sides each have valid arguments. I don't envy the judges that must make that call.
    • etchalon 11mo ago
      If they're reproducing NY Times articles, in full, that that is non-transformative. That's the point of the case.
      • mapontosevenths 11mo ago
        > That's the point of the case. No, its not. See the PDF of the actual case below. The case is largely about OpenAI training on the NY Times articles without permission. They do allege that it can reproduce their articles verbatim at times, but that's not the central allegation as it's obviously a bug and not an intentional infringement. You have to get way down to item 98 before they even allege it. https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...
        • etchalon 11mo ago
          They alleged it in point 4? "Defendants have refused to recognize this protection. Powered by LLMs containing copies of Times content, Defendants’ GenAI tools can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style, as demonstrated by scores of examples. See Exhibit J. These tools also wrongly attribute false information to The Times."
• eur0pa 11mo ago
  This is laughable
• rpdillon 11mo ago
  I wouldn't want to make it out like I think OpenAI is the good guy here. I don't. But conversations people thought they were having with OpenAI in private are now going to be scoured by the New York Times' lawyers. I'm aware of the third party doctrine and that if you put something online it can never be actually private. But I think this also runs counter to people's expectations when they're using the product. In copyright cases, typically you need to show some kind of harm. This case is unusual because the New York Times can't point to any harm, so they have to trawl through private conversations OpenAI's customers have had with their service to see if they can find any. It's quite literally a fishing expedition.
  • Sherveen 11mo ago
    Yeah, everyone else in the comments so far is acting emotionally, but -- As a fan and DAU of both OpenAI and the NYT, this is just a weird discovery demand and there should be another pathway for these two to move fwd in this case (NYT to get some semblance of understanding, OAI protecting end-user privacy).
    • totallymike 11mo ago
      It sounds like the alternate path you're suggesting is for NYT to stop being wrong and let OpenAI continue being right, which doesn't sound much like a compromise to me.
  • Alex2037 11mo ago
    >But conversations people thought they were having with OpenAI in private ...had never been private in the first place. not only is the data used for refining the models, OpenAI had also shariah policed plenty of people for generating erotica.
    • IlikeKitties 11mo ago
      > OpenAI had also shariah policed plenty of people for generating erotica. That framing is retorically brilliant if you think about it. I will use that more. Chat Sharia Law for Chat Control. Mass Sharia Surveillance from flock etc.
• nlh 11mo ago
  Man, maybe I'm getting old and jaded, but it's not often that I read a post that literally makes my skin crawl. This is so transparently icky. "Oh woe is us! We're being sued and we're looking out for YOU the user, who is definitely not the product. We are just a 'lil 'ol (near) trillion-dollar business trying to protect you!" Come ON. Look I don't actually know who's in the right in the OAI vs. NYT dispute, and frankly I personally lean more toward the side the says that you are allowed to train models on the world's information as long as you consume it legally and don't violate copyright. But this transparent attempt to get user sympathy under insanely disingenuous pretenses is just absurd.
  • greyman 11mo ago
    Why it is absurd? Conversation between me and ChatGPT can be read by a lawyer working for NYT, and that is what is absurd.
    • HelloMcFly 11mo ago
      OpenAI has seemingly done everything they can to put publishers in a position to make this demand, and they've certainly not done anything to make it impossible for them to respond to it. Is there a better, more privacy minded way for NYT to get the data they need? Probably, I'm not smart enough to understand all the things that go into such a decision. But I know I don't view them as the villain for asking, and I also know I don't view OpenAI as some sort of guardian of my or my data's best interests.
• nerdjon 11mo ago
  This screams just as genuine as Google saying anything about Privacy. Both companies are clearly wrong here. There is a small part of me that kinda wants openai to loose this, just so maybe it will be a wake up call to people putting in way too personal of information into these services? Am I too hopeful here that people will learn anything... Fundamentally I agree with what they are saying though, just don't find it genuine in the slightest coming from them.
  • stevarino 11mo ago
    Its clearly propaganda. "Your data belongs to you." I'm sure the ToS says otherwise, as OpenAI likely owns and utilizes this data. Yes, they say they are working on end-to-end encryption (whatever that means when they control one end), but that is just a proposal at this point. Also their framing of the NYT intent makes me strongly distrust anything they say. Sit down with a third party interviewer who asks challenging questions, and I'll pay attention.
    • Forgeties79 11mo ago
      >your data belongs to you …”as does any culpability for poisoning yourself, suicide, and anything else we clearly enabled but don’t want to be blamed for!” Edit: honestly I’m surprised I left out the bit where they just indiscriminately scraped everything they could online to train these models. The stones to go “your data belongs to you” as they clearly feel entitled to our data is unbelievably absurd
      • gruez 11mo ago
        >…”as does any culpability for poisoning yourself, suicide, and anything else we clearly enabled but don’t want to be blamed for!” Should walmart be "culpable" for selling rope that someone hanged themselves with? Should google be "culpable" for returning results about how to commit suicide?
        • hitarpetar 11mo ago
• Apreche 11mo ago
  Says the people who scraped as much private information as they could get their hands on to train their bots in the first place.
• unyttigfjelltol 11mo ago
  If Donald Trump used this OpenAI product to-- who knows-- brainstorm Truth Social content, and his chats were produced to the NYT as well as its consultants and lawyers, who would believe Mr. Trump's content remained secure, confidential and protected from misuse against his wishes? That's simply a function of the fact it's a controversial news organization running a dragnet on private communications to a technology platform. "Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law."
• nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
  Open AI deservedly getting a beating in this HN comments section but any comments about NYT overreach and what it means in general? And what if they for example find evidence of X other thing such as: 1. Something useful for a story, maybe they follow up in parallel. Know who to interview and what to ask? 2. A crime. 3. An ongoing crime. 4. Something else they can sue someone else for. 5. Top secret information
  • great_wubwub 11mo ago
    > 5. Top secret information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
  • AlienRobot 11mo ago
    1. That sounds useful. 2. That sounds useful. 3. That sounds useful. 4. That sounds useful. 5. That sounds useful. Are these supposed to be examples of things that shouldn't be found out about? This has to be the worst pro-privacy argument I've ever seen on the internet. "Privacy is good because they will find out about our crimes"
  • totallymike 11mo ago
    1-5: not a concern It'll be the lawyers who need to go through the data, and given the scale of it, they won't be able to do anything more than trawl for the evidence they need and find specific examples to cite. They don't give a shit if you're asking chatgpt how to put a hit out on your ex, and they're not there to editorialize. I wont pretend to guess* how they'll perform the discovery, but I highly doubt it will result in humans reading more than a handful of the records in total outside of the ones found via whatever method they automate the discovery process. If there's top secret information in there, and it was somehow stumbled upon by one of these lawyers or a paralegal somewhere, I find it impossibly unlikely they'd be stupid enough to do anything other than run directly to whomever is the rightful possessor of said information and say "hey we found this in this place it shouldn't be" and then let them deal with it. Which is what we'd want them to do. *Though if I had to speculate on how they'd do it, I do think the funniest way would be to feed the records back into chatgpt and ask it to point out all the times the records show evidence of infringement
• vintagedave 11mo ago
  Almost every comment (five) so far is against this: 'An incredibly cynical attempt at spin', 'How dare the New York Times demand access to our vault of everything-we-keep to figure out if we're a bunch of lying asses', etc. In direct contrast: I fully agree with OpenAI here. We can have a more nuanced opinion than 'piracy to train AI is bad therefore refusing to share chats is bad', which sounds absurd but is genuinely how one of the other comments follows logic. Privacy is paramount. People _trust_ that their chats are private: they ask sensitive questions, ones to do with intensely personal or private or confidential things. For that to be broken -- for a company to force users to have their private data accessed -- is vile. The tech community has largely stood against this kind of thing when it's been invasive scanning of private messages, tracking user data, etc. I hope we can collectively be better (I'm using ethical terms for a reason) than the other replies show. We don't have to support OpenAI's actions in order to oppose the NYT's actions.
  • glenstein 11mo ago
    I suspect that many of those comments are from the Philosopher's Chair (aka bathroom), and are not aspiring to be literal answers but are ways of saying "OpenAI Bad". But to your point there should be privacy preserving ways to comply, like user anonymization, tailored searches and so on. It sounds like the NYT is proposing a random sampling of user data. But couldn't they instead do a random sampling of their most widely read articles, for positive hits, rather than reviewing content on a case by case basis?
    • vintagedave 11mo ago
      I hadn't heard of the philosopher's chair before, but I laughed :) Yes, I think those views were one-sided (OpenAI Bad) without thinking through other viewpoints. IMO we can have multiple views over multiple companies and actions. And the sort of discussions I value here on HN are ones where people share insight, thought, show some amount of deeper thinking. I wanted to challenge for that with my comment. _If_ we agree the NYT even has a reason to examine chats -- and I think even that should be where the conversation is -- I agree that there should be other ways to achieve it without violating privacy.
• BitsAndObjects 11mo ago
  So why aren’t they offering for an independent auditor to come into OpenAI and inspect their data (without taking it outside of OpenAI’s systems)? Probably because they have a lot to hide, a lot to lose, and no interest in fair play. Theoretically, they could prove their tools aren’t being used to doing anything wrong but practically, we all know they can’t because they are actually in the wrong (in both the moral and, IMO though IANAL, the legal sense). They know it, we know it, the only problem is breaking the ridiculous walled garden that stops the courts from ‘knowing’ it.
  • glenstein 11mo ago
    By the same token, why isn't NYT proposing something like that rather than the world's largest random sampling? You don't have to think that OpenAI is good to think there's a legitimate issue over exposing data to a third party for discovery. One could see the Times discovering something in private conversations outside the scope of the case, but through their own interpretation of journalistic necessity, believe it's something they're obligated to publish. Part of OpenAI holding up their side of the bargain on user data, to the extent they do, is that they don't roll over like a beaten dog to accommodate unconditional discovery requests.
    • freejazz 11mo ago
      >By the same token, why isn't NYT proposing something like that rather than the world's largest random sampling? It's OpenAI's data, there is a protective order in the case and OpenAI already agreed to anonymize it all. >Part of OpenAI holding up their side of the bargain on user data, to the extent they do, is that they don't roll over like a beaten dog to accommodate unconditional discovery requests. lol... what?
      • glenstein 11mo ago
        Discovery isn't binary yes/no, it involves competing proposals regarding methods and scope for satisfying information requests. Sometimes requests are egregious or excessive, sometimes they are reasonable and subject to excessively zealous pushback. Maybe you didn't read TFA but part of the case history was NYT requesting 1.4 billion records as part of discovery and being successfully challenged by OpenAI as unnecessary, and the essence of TFA is advocating for an alternative to the scope of discovery NYT is insisting on, hence the "not rolling over". Try reading, it's fun!
• sroussey 11mo ago
  I keep asking ChatGPT how to get NYT articles for free and then add lots of vulgar murderous things about their lawyers in the same message. It’s a private thought to an AI, so the attorneys can’t complain, right?
• ale42 11mo ago
  Why should OpenAI keep those conversations in the first point? (of course the answer is obvious) If they didn't keep them, they wouldn't have anything to hand over, and they would have protected users' privacy MUCH better. This is just as good as Facebook or Google care about their users' privacy.
  • HPsquared 11mo ago
    They didn't keep temporary chats. They were ordered to keep those as part of this case.
    • gruez 11mo ago
      >They didn't keep temporary chats I thought they did? The warning currently says >This chat won't appear in history, use or update ChatGPT's memory, or be used to train our models. For safety purposes, we may keep a copy of this chat for up to 30 days. But AFAIK it was this way before the lawsuit as well.
      • HPsquared 11mo ago
        30 days is perhaps a bit long, but they didn't keep them longer than that. It's pretty clear and reasonable. The dodgy thing is that they don't now warn users that all chats, including temporary, are now "Bcc: NYT"
        • mhitza 11mo ago
          The NYT requests samples between Dec 2022 and Dec 2024. The judge order to preserve chats came in effect this summer after OpenAI engineers deleted, claiming mistake, the VM in which NYT layers were processing data. Dates and the 30 day default retention policy don't add up, when framing things this way.
• bgwalter 11mo ago
  The heroic fight for privacy apparently includes having an ex-NSA director on the board and building user dossiers: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/what-llms-know-about-their-users.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/what-llms-kno... At some point they'll monetize these dossiers.
• amelius 11mo ago
  Maybe they should release some kind of NYT browser add-on, so users can cooperatively share their OpenAI data?
  • mrbungie 11mo ago
    OpenAI would/could say the data is biased (maybe even purposefully).
• HPsquared 11mo ago
  Can this legal principle be used on Gmail too?
  • jasonsb 11mo ago
    Of course this principle applies to Gmail too, if you’re willing to accept the absurdity. I could copy-paste copyrighted NYT snippets into emails and send them to everyone I know. Under the same logic, the NYT would be entitled to have access to everyone's Gmail account in order to verify who's sending what and get compensated if anyone is infringing their copyright. That’s not justice. That’s legal extortion. I get that people are angry at OpenAI. But let’s not confuse outrage over one company with support for broken systems. Patent and copyright trolls thrive when we normalize overreach, whether it’s AI training data or email threads. If we let corporations weaponize IP law to control every digital whisper, we’re not protecting creators, we’re burying free expression under a mountain of lawsuits.
    • ripe 11mo ago
      > That’s not justice. That’s legal extortion. If you made it your business to publish a newsletter containing copied NYT articles, then wouldn't they have the right to go after you and discover your sent emails?
      • rocmcd 11mo ago
        Exactly, they wouldn't even need all of the emails in gmail for that example, just the ones from a specific account. The real equivalent here would be if gmail itself was injecting NYT articles into your emails. I'm assuming in that scenario most people would see it as straightforward that gmail was infringing NYT content.
    • watwut 11mo ago
      If you make a business out of that, then yes, it is copyright infringement and thus you can be sued. Are we supposed to be outraged over someone making a business out of newspaper articles they did not wrote being potentially sued? Your example is not nearly an example of copyright troll or overreach.
• pyrophane 11mo ago
  Wondering if anyone here has a good answer to this: what protection does user data typically have during legal discovery in a civil suit like this where the defendant is a service provider but relevant evidence is likely present in user data? Does a judge have to weigh a users' expectation of privacy against the request? Do terms of service come into play here (who actually owns the data? what privacy guarantees does the company make?). I'm assuming in this case that the request itself isn't overly broad and seems like a legitimate use of the discovery process.
  • dangoodmanUT 11mo ago
    it is dramatically determined by the state and the judge
• szczepano 11mo ago
  > Each week, 800 million people use ChatGPT to think... I think I have enough with the first sentence, no need to read more. The narration is clear, we are the brain and no one can stop us.
• crmd 11mo ago
  your data belongs to you, just like our data about you belongs to us.
• lingrush4 11mo ago
  I fully believe that OpenAI is essentially stealing the work of others by training their models on it without permission. However, giving a corporation infamous for promoting authoritarianism full access to millions of private conversations is not the answer. OpenAI is right here. The NYT needs to prove their case another way.
  • marstall 11mo ago
    > infamous for promoting authoritarianism what are you referencing here?
  • crazygringo 11mo ago
    > giving a corporation infamous for promoting authoritarianism The NYT is certainly open to criticism along many fronts, but I don't have the slightest idea what you mean in claiming it promotes authoritarianism.
    • jimbob45 11mo ago
      Well, the sponsors of the 1619 Project really don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to ethics.
      • crazygringo 11mo ago
        I already said the NYT is certainly open to criticism. I fail to see any connection between the 1619 Project and authoritarianism.
    • msla 11mo ago
      It supports Trump by failing to report on his problems (such as ties to Epstein) while constantly attacking his enemies.
  • ibejoeb 11mo ago
    I'll bet you're right in some cases. I don't think that it is as pervasive as it has been made out to be though, but the argument requires some framing and current rules, regulation, and laws aren't tuned to make legal sense of this. (This is a little tangential, because the complaint seems to be about getting ChatGPT to reproduce content verbatim to a third party.) There are two things I think about: First, and generally, an AI ought to be able to ingest content like news articles because it's beneficial for users of AI. I would like to question an AI about current events. Secondly, however, the legal mechanism by which it does that isn't clear. I think it would be helpful if these outlets would provide the information as long as the AI won't reproduce the content verbatim. If that does not happen, then another framing might liken the AI ingestion as an individual going to the library to read the paper. In that case, we don't require the individual to retroactively pay for the experience or unlearn what he may have learned while at the library.
• pessimizer 11mo ago
  I'm sorry, but we've made a lot of conversations illegal and pretended like that was all right. I'm sure we've made advising people how to dodge paywalls illegal as part of DMCA and/or some anti-hacking law, or some other garbage. I'm also sure that you run an automated service that will advise and has advised people on how to dodge paywalls. Even if there are exceptions for individuals giving advice to friends, or people giving advice for free, you are neither of those: you are a profit-making paid corporation that is automating this process which may be illegal. You may be a hacking endorser, a hacking advisor, and a hacking tool. Under those circumstances, why wouldn't NYT have a case? I advise everybody who employs some sort of DRM or online system that limits access to ask for every chat that every one of these companies has ever had with anyone. Why are they the only people who get to break copyright and hacking laws? Why are they the only people who get to have private conversations? I might also check if any LLMs have ever endorsed terrorist points of view (or banned political parties) during a chat, because even though those points of view may be correct (depending on the organization), endorsing them may be illegal and make you subject to sanctions or arrest. If people can't just speak, certainly corporate LLMs shouldn't be able to.
• NoSalt 11mo ago
  Another good reason to stay logged out when asking ChatGPT questions.
  • mmooss 11mo ago
    It's common and trivial to identify you by other means.
    • NoSalt 11mo ago
      Indeed, but one more step (staying logged out), absolutely cannot hurt, and can help.
    • ectospheno 11mo ago
      Similar trains of thought: I can’t fix global warming by myself so I’m going to do nothing. Politicians don’t listen to my age group so I don’t vote. I can’t donate to every charity so I won’t donate to any. Everyone else ignores traffic laws so why should I care?
      • mmooss 11mo ago
        Those aren't similar. Those are social goods that require people to do them en masse to work, and defeatist attitudes. In this case, logging off isn't a social good and I'm saying it won't do much. There are ways to maintain privacy, just not this one.
        • ectospheno 11mo ago
          Intelligent people can disagree on the meaning of similar is seems.
          • mmooss 11mo ago
            Yet not every disagreement is intelligent.
• plorg 11mo ago
  As in every other dealing, OpenAI would have you believe they are so important that they are exempt from the legal discovery process.
  • buellerbueller 11mo ago
    Standard tech scaling playbook, page 69420: there is a function f(x) whereby if you're growing fast enough, you can ignore the laws, then buy the regulators. This is called "The Uber Curve"
• freejazz 11mo ago
  OpenAI is so full of shit, this is incredible. There is a protective order and the logs are anonymized. Yet they would happily give this all to the gov't under a warrant. Incredibly self serving bs from them. The court ordered the production, I'm not sure what OpenAI is even trying to sell people exactly.
• cowpig 11mo ago
  If there's one thing I've learned about Sam Altman it's that he's a shrewd political manipulator and every public move is in service of a hidden agenda[1]. What is it here? - Is it part of a slow process of eroding public expectations of data privacy while blaming it on an external actor? - Is it to undermine trust in traditional media, in an effort to increase dependence on AI companies as a source of truth? - Is something else I'm not seeing? I'm guessing it's all three of these? [1] Those emails that came up in the suit with Elon Musk, followed by his eventual complete takeover of OpenAI, and the elaborate process of getting himself installed as chairman of the Reddit board to get the original founders back in control are prominent examples.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
  "The New York Times is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private ChatGPT conversations." As might any plaintiff. NYT might be the first of many others and the lawsuits may not be limited to copyright claims Why has OpenAI collected and stored 20 million conversations (including "deleted chats") What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations By contrast the purpose of NYT's request is both clear and limited The documents requested are not being made public by the plaintiffs. The documents will presumably be redacted to protect any confidential information before being produced to the plaintiffs, the documents can only be used by the plaintiffs for the purpose of the litigation against OpenAI and, unlike OpenAI who has collected and stored these conversations for as long as OpenAI desires, the plaintiffs are prohibited from retaining copies of the documents after the litigation is concluded The privacy issue here has been created by OpenAI for their own commercial benefit It is not even clear what this benefit, if any, will be as OpenAI continues to search for a "business model" Wanton data collection
  • silveraxe93 11mo ago
    No it's not. It's literally a court order mandating them to collect this data. - [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/openai-offers-20-million-user-chats-in-chatgpt-lawsuit-nyt-wants-120-million/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/openai-offers-20...
    • sailfast 11mo ago
      This is an excellent article and source. Thank you.
    • otterley 11mo ago
      This article says nothing of the sort. The court order is to preserve existing logs they already have, not to disable logging, and hand all the logs over the plaintiffs. OpenAI's objections are mainly that 1/there are too many logs (so they're proposing a sample instead) and that 2/there's identifying data in the logs and so they are being "forced" to anonymize the logs at their expense (even though it's what they want as a condition of transferring the logs). There is nothing in the article that mentions OpenAI being forced to create new logs they don't already have.
• JCM9 11mo ago
  This is BS. It’s like saying “We robbed a jewelry store and sold the jewelry. Now the police are poking around to see if anyone is wearing the jewelry we stole. Blasphemy! But don’t worry we will protect your privacy!” Of course the Times wants more evidence that the content OpenAI allegedly stole is ending in things OpenAI is selling.
  • AlienRobot 11mo ago
    It's more like a torrent tracker telling users that a newspaper wants to know what people are torrenting because they "claim" people are torrenting the newspaper, but investigating this would be an invasion of privacy of the users of the torrent tracker. This isn't even a hyperbole. It's literally the same thing.
    • freejazz 11mo ago
      No, it's not. OpenAI is a commercial enterprise selling the stolen data.
• AlienRobot 11mo ago
  >They claim they might find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall. Is this a joke? We all know people do this. There is no "might" in it. They WILL find it. OpenAI is trying to make it look like this is a breach of user's privacy, when the reality is that it's operating like a pirate website and if it were investigated that would become proven.
• prmoustache 11mo ago
  Always funny to see this kind of article behind a cookie banner. So much hypocrisy.
• sailfast 11mo ago
  20M seems like a low number and I’m guessing they all used citations or similar content somewhere on the back-end that would map to NYTimes content as a result of a legal discovery request. Also down to 20M from 120M per court order. Sorry, but this seems a completely reasonable standard for discovery to me given the total lack of privacy on the platform - especially for free users. Also sorry it probably means you’re going to owe a lot of money to the Times.
• sailfast 11mo ago
  It’s a mystery to me why companies that know they’re pushing a line of fair use or regulation are suddenly “surprised” when they get sued. They could’ve asked permission. They could have worked with content providers instead of scraping. But they didn’t - and they knew what could happen. FA (with fair use boundaries) and FO
• outside1234 11mo ago
  Dude, you stole all of their articles to train your AI. Of course they want discovery. Man, the sooner this company goes bankrupt the better.
• etchalon 11mo ago
  This is so transparently disingenuous and weird.
• otterley 11mo ago
  From the FAQ: > Q: Is the NYT obligated to keep this data private? > A: Yes. The Times would be legally obligated at this time to not make any data public outside the court process. The NY Times has built over a century a reputation for fiercely protecting its confidential sources. Why are they somehow less trustworthy than OpenAI is? If the NY Times leaked the customer information to a third party, they'd be in contempt of court. On the other hand, OpenAI is bound only by their terms of service with its customers, which they can modify as they please.
  • mmooss 11mo ago
    I generally agree, but publicizing the data is only a small part of the risk. The NYT could use the data for journalism research, then perform parallel construction of it for the public news article: For example, if they find Mayor X asking ChatGPT about fraud, porn, DUI, cancer diagnoses, murder, etc. - maybe even mentioning names, places, etc. - they could then investigate that issue, find other evidence, and publish that.
    • otterley 11mo ago
      First, the logs are supposed to be anonymized before being sent over. Second, the court can order the company's lawyers to "firewall" the logs from the newsroom so that their journalists can't get access to it, under penalty of contempt and potential disbarment.
• wkat4242 11mo ago
  If OpenAI hadn't used data from the NYT without permission in the first place this wouldn't have happened. That is the root cause of all this. I'm glad the NYT is fighting them. They've infringed the rights of almost every news outlet but someone has to bring this case.
  • johnwheeler 11mo ago
    Exactly. And the OpenAI corporates speak acting like they give a shit about our best interests. Give me a break, Sam Altman. How stupid do you think everyone is? They have proven that they are the most untrustworthy company on the planet And this isn't AI fear speaking. This is me raging at Sam Altman for spreading so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt just to get investments. The rest of us have to suffer for the last two years, worrying about losing our jobs, only to find out the AGI lie is complete bullsh*t.
    • NewsaHackO 11mo ago
      To me, no company has the customers’ best interests in mind. This whole thing is akin to when Apple was refusing to unlock phones for the FBI. Of course, Apple profits by having people think that they take privacy seriously, and they demonstrate it by protecting users’ privacy. Same thing here; OpenAI needs chats to have some expectation of privacy, especially because a large use case of AI is personal advice on things. So they are fighting to make sure it's true.
      • immibis 11mo ago
        Both OpenAI and NYT are bad. I don't know about NYT's privacy policy, because that's not really the industry they're in, but they did admit to fabricating a story that led to a now 2-year-long war, so.
        • NewsaHackO 11mo ago
          Yes, but I think at least in this instance, OpenAI needs people to think that what they ask ChatGPT is private. They will have no business model if everyone thought that whatever private question they ask could fall into the hands of a media company and be used for anything. Also, at least when I signed up, you had to provide either a highly trusted email address or phone number to sign up, so your identity is definitely attached to whatever question you ask ChatGPT. They know how high the stakes are for them in this suit.
• stackedinserter 11mo ago
  WTF with all these comments. Regardless on OpenAI reputation and practices, I don't want NYT or anyone else to see my conversations, I completely agree to OpenAI here.
  • buellerbueller 11mo ago
    >I don't want NYT or anyone else to see my conversations Except for OpenAI, apparently.
    • stackedinserter 11mo ago
      Obviously for OpenAI, because they providing the service. Same for my doctor, my pharmacist and my lawyer. What was your point?
  • brandonmenc 11mo ago
    Agree. Everyone would be singing a different tune if say, Fox News were asking for this.
    • stackedinserter 11mo ago
      Yeah, it will be funny to see people turn 180, Fox should do that just for teh lulz.
• micromacrofoot 11mo ago
  "they're invading your privacy by requesting access to our invasion of your privacy!"
• lazyeye 11mo ago
  The NYT used to market itself to advertisers with the observation that "our readers have the highest disposable income of any paper in the US". It gives an interesting insight into politics and the modern Democrat party that the newspaper of the wealthy leans so strongly left. This was even before Trump came to power.
• bigbuppo 11mo ago
  If the information is really that sensitive, why did they keep it in the first place?
• mmooss 11mo ago
  One reason that people make cynical, deceptive claims is that it doesn't impact their credibility later. The next thing they say, people don't respond, 'well you deceived us last time'; when the honest person says something, others don't give them much credibility. That little bit of morality - truth, honesty, integrity, etc. - is essential to a functioning society that leans toward good outcomes. (Often it seems that many just assume we'll get good outcomes, not that they must work hard to make it happen.)
• theoldgreybeard 11mo ago
  "Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point." Can I just say that everyone sucks here and I hope they both lose somehow?
• infamouscow 11mo ago
  > The New York Times is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private ChatGPT conversations. They claim they might find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall. Let me rewrite this without propaganda: Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lawyers, we couldn't persuade the judge that our malfeasance should be kept from the light of day.
• zkmon 11mo ago
  If OpenAI has to get to this level of pitch, herding its users against their opponent in a legal case, I think they have already lost the battle and reputation. What are they expecting users to do? Revolt against the courts and newspapers?
• paxys 11mo ago
  So much talk about privacy and how this is my private data that the NYT has no right to access. If this is truly my data then it should be okay for me to download it and train my own model on it right? Nope, that would explicitly be disallowed under the terms OpenAI has made me sign and they would ban my account and maybe even sue me for it. So yeah, they are full of shit.
• visiondude 11mo ago
  “NYTimes fights blatant and obvious copyright infringement with legal processes to assess damage” - another angle.
• iammjm 11mo ago
  That's an absolutely disgusting framing by openai. This really is about openai stealing.
• The-Ludwig 11mo ago
  Please correct me if I am wrong, but couldn't OpenAi just encrypt every conversation before saving them? With each query to the model the full conversation is fed into the model again, so I guess there is no technical need to store them unencrypted. Unless, of course, OpenAi wants to analyze the chats. The way I see it, the problem is that OpenAI employees can look at the chats and the fact that some NYT lawyer can look at it doesn't make me more uncomfortable. Insane argumentation. It's like saying an investigator with a court-order should not be allowed to look at stored copies of letters, although the company sending those letters a) looks at them regularly b) stores these copies in the first place.
  • nielsole 11mo ago
    Encryption that you have the keys to won't save you from a court order
    • RugnirViking 11mo ago
      what about encryption only the users have the keys to? I'm assuming thats what parent meant
      • pjc50 11mo ago
        OpenAI has to have the keys so they can run their models on the text, at user request. This is kind of a fundamental issue in cloud computing: it's someone else's computer, which means it's involved in someone else's legal disputes.
  • NewsaHackO 11mo ago
    >With each query to the model the full conversation is fed into the model again, so I guess there is no technical need to store them unencrypted. I am pretty sure this isn't true. They have to have some sort of K-V cache system to make continuing conversations cheaper.
• hedayet 11mo ago
  If it's about* proving that people are getting around the paywall with OpenAI, won't it be much easier to prove this with a live reproduction in the court? * I am not too familiar with this matter and hence definitely am not rooting for one party or another. Asking this just out of technical curiosity.
  • o11c 11mo ago
    No, because OpenAI can change their server at any time - and does, to patch over the cases where their copyright infringement is obvious.
• focusgroup0 11mo ago
  psychopath Scam Altman does not give a rat's behind about your "privacy"; he is merely trying to keep the grift going and avoid responsibility for his unethical behavior (see also: Scarlett Johanssen's voice)
• singleshot_ 11mo ago
  > "The New York Times is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private ChatGPT conversations." Private? Aren’t they stored in a third party server, subject to OpenAI terms of service and all sorts of relevant laws?
• BrenBarn 11mo ago
  What a joke. It's like burglarizing someone's house and then calling the cops when someone else takes your ill-gotten gains.
• jp57 11mo ago
  Wish they'd give a bulk delete interface that lets me choose which chats to keep and which to delete. (i.e. not "Delete All" scorched earth).
• fpauser 11mo ago
  "[..] Trust, security, and privacy guide every product and decision we make. [..]" L O L
• jrockway 11mo ago
  I've noticed a pattern of companies writing their customers open letters asking them to do their contract negotiations for them. First it was ESPN vs. YouTube (not watching MNF this week was the best 3 hours I've ever saved, sorry advertisers). Now it's OpenAI vs. The New York Times. Little do they know that I care very little for either party and enjoy seeing both of them squirm. You went to business school, not me. Work it out. In this case, it's awfully suspicious that OpenAI is worried about The New York Times finding literal passages in their articles that ChatGPT spits out verbatim. If your AI doesn't do that, like you say, then why would it be a problem to check? Finally, both parties should find a neutral third party. The neutral third party gets the full text of every NYT article and ChatGPT transcript, and finds the matches. NYT doesn't get ChatGPT transcripts. OpenAI doesn't get the full text of every NYT article (even though they have to already have that). Everyone is happy. If OpenAI did something illegal, the court can find out. If they didn't, then they're safe. I think it would be very fair. (I take the side of neither party. I'm not a huge fan of training language models on content that wasn't licensed for that purpose. And I'm not a huge fan of The NYT's slide to the right as they cheerlead the end of the American experiment.)
  • themafia 11mo ago
    > Finally, both parties should find a neutral third party. That's next to impossible. And if that party fails to be neutral you've just generated a new lawsuit entangled with this one. The current procedure is each side gets their own expert. The two expert can duke it out and the crucible of the courtroom decides who was more credible.
    • jrockway 11mo ago
      That's fair. I understand why OpenAI wouldn't want to give anyone transcripts (as a user, I frankly wouldn't even want OpenAI to keep my transcripts), and I understand why the NYT doesn't want to give OpenAI all their articles. Maybe the NYT needs to bloom-filter-ify their articles in 10 word chunks (or something, I don't know enough about linguistics to tell you what's unique enough for copyright infringement or to prove "copying"), have OpenAI search transcripts, and turn over the matches. That limits the scope of the search dramatically, but is still invasive.
• duxup 11mo ago
  "We stored all kinds of data about you! Someone ELSE having it is bad!" -OpenAI Hard to be sympathetic with OpenAI here.
• d--b 11mo ago
  The nerve!!! That on top of every lie they told, every value they betrayed, every line they crossed, they still have the nerve to blog about being the good guy!
• poolnoodle 11mo ago
  What a lousy attempt at flipping the narrative.
• einrealist 11mo ago
  Each prompt is a potential confession.
• internetguy 11mo ago
  LMAO How ironic...
• TacticalCoder 11mo ago
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• vmh1928 11mo ago
  "we built a tool using other people's copyrighted content and now they're suing us and want to know how much use the customers of our "other people's content" tool made of the copyrighted content we used to train the model. Thank you for your attention and outrage over this matter."
• sam-cop-vimes 11mo ago
  It's a bit rich for openai to claim they are protecting user data from journalists. Laughable, at best.
• stevage 11mo ago
  As soon as I see someone claiming a lawsuit against them is "baseless" I'm deeply sceptical about everything that follows.
  • rpdillon 11mo ago
    When I looked for the base of this lawsuit, I was looking for some kind of monetary damage that the New York Times had suffered as a result of open AI's actions, like specific cases where their work has been reproduced or people canceling their subscriptions to the New York Times because of OpenAI's launch. I've done so much reading, and I've still been unable to find anything that articulates this. Do you know of anything that talks about it?
    • stevage 11mo ago
      >specific cases where their work has been reproduced Isn't that exactly what they're trying to find by looking through OpenAI customers' conversations?
      • rpdillon 11mo ago
        Indeed. But then that makes me wonder why anyone thinks their hypothesis is particularly strong that this is happening. To make an inappropriate analogy, this is like assuming that somebody's house has weapons, and so you demand to go through every possession in their home to uncover the weapon. My question is, why do you think there are weapons in the house?
        • stevage 11mo ago
          Because they have been visiting your house a lot, and your weapons are missing.
• nixpulvis 11mo ago
  I mean, I hate that our lives are becoming consistently more and more surveilled, but this doesn't shock me. I've assumed my Google search history is accessible, despite not even being logged in. Of course they are saving conversation. Even if they said they weren't I wouldn't believe it. It's fucking sad, but that's the reality. I wish I had a solution, so we could all feel a sense of freedom and pressure lifted from our thoughts and actions. But I only see this getting worse. So am I upset that the NYT's lawyers want access to the records... a little. It's an invasion of privacy. But I'm more upset that they have anything to dig through to begin with. If only we could see how things within all these companies we are forced to trust actually work. If only OpenAI was actually open. When will we all learn to demand open source, open platform services. Capitalize the development, and capitalize the infrastructure, but leave the process and operations out in the open so users can make informed decisions again. Normalize it like how homes are normally inspected before being purchased.
• phendrenad2 11mo ago
  > This would allow them to access millions of user conversations that are unrelated to the case What I don't understand is why they can't have a third party handle the data. Why does the NYT need it itself?
• fguerraz 11mo ago
  OpenAI created this problem all by themselves. If the intention for private chats is that they should be private, then they should be e2e encrypted.
• Rafuino 11mo ago
  LOL they think they can win with the privacy angle? They've scraped the entire internet, including what is likely incredibly private and personal information, and they also log everything you do on the service. Get outta heah
• Ms-J 11mo ago
  ClosedAI vacuums up and hoards all of your private chats to do terrible things and now complains when they must hand over your precious data without them receiving their cut. This is funny!
• zaptheimpaler 11mo ago
  These are the same scumbags that scraped the entire internet including copyrighted books and private code without any regard for legality or ownership, now trying to spin them being sued for theft as a privacy issue.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• zahma 11mo ago
  Apparently OpenAI has zero interest in private user data. I have a hard time understanding how they’ll deploy this defense of “what about private user data?” in court.
• Frieren 11mo ago
  > Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy OpenAI is lying about why they are doing this. They want the public to attack the New York Times because OpenAI probably broke the law in so many ways... If they cared about privacy they would no training their models on that same private data. But here we are. We need very strong regulations to rule in all these tech companies and make them work for their users instead of working against them and lying about it.
• shevy-java 11mo ago
  They all want our data. Greedy organisations.
• Havoc 11mo ago
  This feels somewhat slimy as a PR piece but the message is valid. Letting NYT trawl through a bunch of private chats on suspicion just to check if there was some vague wrongdoing in the form of paywall bypass seems ridiculous Chats contain way too much sensitive private data to subject them to bulk fishing expeditions
• this15testingg 11mo ago
  the constant hypocrisy is unbearable. these people having so much power is holding humanity back.
• meV1 11mo ago
  It ridiculous for OpenAI to attempt to claim some moral high-ground here. They're a company that has demonstrated zero respect for the copyright or data privacy regulations of other organisations. I think they take users dignity and rights with a grain of salt. Their statements are all aspirational, "we're working toward de-identifying" etc. They've built one of the most powerful AIs ever seen and now they're claiming it's difficult to delete, de-identify / anonymize. Maybe they should ask their AI to do it :-) It's impossible to take this company seriously. They're nothing but a carny barker stealing everything of value that they can lay their (creepy) hands on.
  • perplex3d 11mo ago
    The “aspirational” language is what really stood out to me as well. “We’re building our privacy and security protections to match the responsibility” and “we are accelerating our security and privacy roadmap” and “our long term roadmap includes advanced security features designed to keep your data private, including client-side encryption” (what does this have to do with what OpenAI stores server-side?) and “we will build.” If OpenAI cared that much, then the privacy and security protections should be baked in rather than “tacked on.” Their statement makes me feel even less optimistic in their abilities to protect information.
• cestith 11mo ago
  Welcome to discovery. It’s what happens when you get sued. Meanwhile, OpenAI talking about invading privacy sounds an awful lot like a claim with unclean hands.
• tritip 11mo ago
  A very Musky attempt to win popular support.
• leumon 11mo ago
  This problem wouldn't exist if openai wouldn't store chatlogs (which of course they want to do, so that they can train on that data to improve the models). But calling nyt the bad guy here is simply wrong because it's not strictly necessary to store that data at all, and if you do, there will always be a risk of others getting access to it.
• tonetheman 11mo ago
  [dead]
• manchicken 11mo ago
  Privacy for me but not for thee
• cbondurant 11mo ago
  This is rich coming from the company that scraped the entire internet and tons of pirated books and scientific papers to train their models. Maybe if you didn't scrape every single site on the internet they wouldn't have a basis for their case that you've stolen all of their articles through training your models on them. If anyone is to blame for this its openAI, not the NYT. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
• pkilgore 11mo ago
  If you do anything in America that results in a stored record it's possible it will be released in discovery and a lawyer will read it. This happens all the time, and has happened for hundreds years. It's not like the NYT will be published this shit in the news. Their lawyers and experts will have access to make a legal case, under a protective order. I'm not going to lose my law license because I'm doing doc review and you asked it something naughty and I think it's funny. Courts and lawyers deal with this stuff all the time. What's very very weird to me is how upset OpenAI is about it. They look like they are hiding something.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• cyrusradfar 11mo ago
  The request is for redacted logs. Redaction must be reasonable but OpenAI can protect the PII across 20M conversations if they: 1. search conversations for PII they know of for the given user and redact 2. use their own models to scrub the conversations of non-verbatim mentions In the end, the NYT isn't asking for the identity of the posters. If that was the case, I'd 100% be onboard to scream bloody murder with 'em.