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Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

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Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#241

Post by terminalshort »

mikkupikku wrote: post #223
realusername wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NYTimes has produced credible evidence that OpenAI is simply stealing and republishing their content. The question they have to answer is "to what extent has this happened?" Credible to whom? In their supposed "investigation", they sent a whole page of text and complex pre-prompting and still failed to get the exact content back word for word. Something users would never do anyways. And that's probably the best the…

Agreed, they could carefully coerce the model to more or less output some of their articles, but the premise that users were routinely doing this to bypass the paywall is silly.

Especially when you can just copy paste the url into Internet Archive and read it. And yet they aren't suing Internet Archive.

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#243

Post by terminalshort »

rpdillon wrote: post #229
otterley wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This case is unusual because the New York Times can't point to any harm It helps to read the complaint. If that was the case, the case would have been subject to a Rule 12(b)(6) (failure to state a claim for which relief can be granted) challenge and closed. Complaint: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20... See pages 60ff.

My observation is that section does not articulate any harm. It _claims_ harm, but doesn't actually explain what the harm is. Reduced profits? Lower readership? All they say is "OpenAI violated our copyrights, and we deserve money." > 167. As a direct and proximate result of Defendants’ infringing conduct alleged herein, The Times has sustained and will continue to sustain substantial, immediate, and irreparable inju…

> sustain substantial, immediate, and irreparable

Furthermore, any alleged injury is absolutely reparable. How many times did OpenAI replicate their content and how many page views did they lose to it? Very reparable monetary damages, if it did in fact occur (and I'm pretty sure it didn't).

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#244

Post by terminalshort »

Noaidi wrote: post #77
rpdillon wrote: post #13

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 c…

To show harm they need the proof, this is the point of the lawsuit. They have sufficient evidence that OpenAI was scraping the web and the NY Times. When Altman says "They claim they might find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall." he is blatantly misrepresenting the case. https://smithhopen.com/2025/07/17/nyt-v-openai-microsoft-ai-... "The lawsuit focuses on using copyrighted material fo…

> The lawsuit focuses on using copyrighted material for AI training

Well that's going to go pretty poorly for them considering it has already been ruled fair use twice: https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/two-california-distr...

On the other hand, distributing copies of NYT content is actually a breach of copyright, but only if the NYT can prove it was actually happening.

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#245

Post by terminalshort »

BitsAndObjects wrote: post #26

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 an…

> Theoretically, they could prove their tools aren’t being used to doing anything wrong

That is proving a negative. You are never required to prove a negative.

> the only problem is breaking the ridiculous walled garden that stops the courts from ‘knowing’ it.

The "problem" of privacy?

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#246

Post by Aurornis »

andrepd wrote: post #202
Aurornis wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a technical limitation that prevents chat histories from being stored locally on the user's computer People access ChatGPT through different interfaces: Web, desktop app, their phones, tablets. Therefore the conversations are stored on the servers. It's really not some hidden plot against users to steal their data. It's just how most users expect their apps to work.

Nonsense. It's easy to design an app where the server stores all information in an encrypted form. If OpenAI "cared about privacy" like this PR piece claims, they would do this. They don't because they (obviously) don't care and they (obviously) want the data for their purposes.

> It's easy to design an app where the server stores all information in an encrypted form.

If you read the article, you'd see this:

> Our long-term roadmap includes advanced security features designed to keep your data private, including client-side encryption for your messages

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#247

Post by JCM9 »

thorum wrote: post #234
baobun wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have been stored at the client, and encrypted before optionally synced back to OpenAI servers in a way that the stored chats can only be read back by the user. Signal illustrates how this is possible. OpenAI made a choice in how the feature was and is implemented.

> Our long-term roadmap includes advanced security features designed to keep your data private, including client-side encryption for your messages with ChatGPT. We believe these features will help keep your private conversations private and inaccessible to anyone else, even OpenAI.

This sort of thing is pretty trivial to implement from the start, they just chose not to because they wanted the data themselves

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#248

Post by JCM9 »

terminalshort wrote: post #237
wkat4242 wrote: post #120

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.

They infringed nothing. Two judges have already ruled that training on copyrighted data is fair use https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/two-california-distr...

The issue is, in part, a concern that ChatGPT responses are often just simple derivations of the original content in ways that wouldn’t be considered fair use.

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#249

Post by dylan604 »

FloorEgg wrote: post #238
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does OpenAI collect and retain for 30 days^1 chats that the user wants to be deleted It was doing this prior to being sued by the NYT and many others OpenAI was collecting chats even when the user asked for deletion, i.e., the user did not want them saved That's why a lawsuit could require OpenAi to issue a hold order, retain these chats for longer and produce them to another party in discovery If OpenAI was not…

I'm not commenting on the core point of your comment, only the "why retain for 30 days" question. Im an age of automated backups and failovers, deleting can be really hard. Part of the answer could simply be that syncing a delete across all the redundancies (while ensuring those redundancies are reliable when a disaster happens and they need to recover or maintain uptime) may take days to weeks. Also the 30 days coul…

What is the standard way of being forced to restore from backup while ensuring deleted data does not also become restored? Is every delete request stored so that it can be replayed against any restore?

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#250

Post by FloorEgg »

dylan604 wrote: post #249
FloorEgg wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not commenting on the core point of your comment, only the "why retain for 30 days" question. Im an age of automated backups and failovers, deleting can be really hard. Part of the answer could simply be that syncing a delete across all the redundancies (while ensuring those redundancies are reliable when a disaster happens and they need to recover or maintain uptime) may take days to weeks. Also the 30 days coul…

What is the standard way of being forced to restore from backup while ensuring deleted data does not also become restored? Is every delete request stored so that it can be replayed against any restore?

I have only had to manage this in a startup context with relatively low stakes and it was hard and messy. I don't know what best practice is at the scale that openai operates, but from my limited experience I have an intuition that the challenge is not trivial.

Also I suspect there is a big gap between best practice and common practice. My guess is common practice is dysfunctional. I would also suspect there is no standard way, but there are established practices within different technology stacks that vary between performative, barely compliant and effective at scale.

In one case I saw there was a substantial manual effort to load snapshots into instances run the delete and then save new snapshots. This was over 10 years ago though and it was more of a "we just need to get this done" than a "what's the most elegant way to do this at scale"

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