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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

#431

Post by ectospheno »

mmooss wrote: post #430
ectospheno wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Intelligent people can disagree on the meaning of similar is seems.

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

#432

Post by mmooss »

ectospheno wrote: post #431
mmooss wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intelligent people can disagree on the meaning of similar is seems.

Yet not every disagreement is intelligent.

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

#433

Post by giraffe_lady »

sroussey wrote: post #424
giraffe_lady wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've successfully fought a subpoena on the basis of a third party's privacy? More than once? I'd love to hear more.

I was CEO of a small startup called Network54 with about 4 million monthly users. It was a forum hosting service. The early 2000s were the heyday of lawsuits. People would say something about someone and if that someone was rich they would sue. It happened often. The attorneys would sue us, the domain registrar, the ISP, everyone. Often the things said were true. But they would sue to find out who the people were. Pe…

Ah interesting, thanks for answering.

I've been in the situation of being instructed to pull unredacted logs for a subpoena before when I really did not think it was appropriate. I was just an IC but I talked to a lawyer about it. Since the company I worked for was not willing to fight it, my options were pull the logs, quit the job, or possibly catch a contempt charge.

It seems like everyone who is not the CEO or maybe the legal dept has much more constrained choices in this situation. I also wonder if the timeframes matter here, how much things may have changed in two decades. My experience with it was only a couple years ago, and I was surprised they chose not to fight it but presumably they know more about the chances of success than I do.

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

#434

Post by sroussey »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #433
sroussey wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was CEO of a small startup called Network54 with about 4 million monthly users. It was a forum hosting service. The early 2000s were the heyday of lawsuits. People would say something about someone and if that someone was rich they would sue. It happened often. The attorneys would sue us, the domain registrar, the ISP, everyone. Often the things said were true. But they would sue to find out who the people were. Pe…

Ah interesting, thanks for answering. I've been in the situation of being instructed to pull unredacted logs for a subpoena before when I really did not think it was appropriate. I was just an IC but I talked to a lawyer about it. Since the company I worked for was not willing to fight it, my options were pull the logs, quit the job, or possibly catch a contempt charge. It seems like everyone who is not the CEO or ma…

Yahoo got sued for not fighting it long enough to give a chance for the third party to quash on their own. If I remember correctly, they lost. But the case had a good argument of fairness to the little people whose data is just being given away and people fired or harassed because of it.

Anyhow, we worked with Public Citizen on a couple of cases and they were willing to fund to Supreme Court in order to set good precedent.

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

#435

Post by stef25 »

Y_Y wrote: post #391
stef25 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does OpenAI collect and retain for 30 days^1 chats that the user wants to be deleted When working on an e-commerce gig we would get "delete my data" requests from customers, which we're legally obliged to comply with. A script would delete everything we could from the DB immediately. Since we had 30 day backups, their data would only be deleted from the backups on day 31. I think this was acceptable to the GDPR…

> Going in to the backups to delete their data there in insane. If I was legally obliged to delete data then I'd make sure I deleted, regardless of the purpose or location of the storage. If you can't handle a delete request you shouldn't collect the data in the first place.

People expect to see their past orders, save their address, keep a shopping cart, a list of favorites etc.

If you don't want your data online then don't put it there.

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

#436

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #81

"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 reques…

Instead of asking, "What is the purpose of OpenAI storing milllions of private conversations" and having HN commenters (mis)interpret this as something other than a rhetorical question, one could ask, "What are the consequences for users of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations that users do not wish to save"

HN replies might try to answer this as well but the answer is already known to the world

The conversations will be made available to the plaintiffs' (including New York Times') attorneys and the plaintiffs' attorneys' experts

If OpenAI did not store such conversations as a matter of practice before being sued, then there would be no private conversations to make available to the plaintiffs' attorneys and their experts

275 upvotes

AFAICT, most HN readers did _not_ misintepret the question

HN replies != HN, it is a small subset of the readership

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

#437

Post by msla »

crazygringo wrote: post #83
lingrush4 wrote: post #68

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.

> 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.

It supports Trump by failing to report on his problems (such as ties to Epstein) while constantly attacking his enemies.

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

#438

Post by stevage »

rpdillon wrote: post #423
stevage wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>specific cases where their work has been reproduced Isn't that exactly what they're trying to find by looking through OpenAI customers' conversations?

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?

Because they have been visiting your house a lot, and your weapons are missing.

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

#439

Post by wkat4242 »

zeofig wrote: post #315
terminalshort wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Two idiot judges.

Agreed

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

#440

Post by cush »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #200
cush wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations Have you used ChatGPT? Your conversation history is on the left rail

"Have you used ChatGPT?" No Large number of upvotes on the quoted comment however. Maybe some of those voters are ChatGPT users I do searching from the command line in text mode. The script I use keeps a "log" (a customised SERP) of all query strings and search result URLs. I also have these URLs stored in the logs from the forward proxy. These are compressed using RePair. I can search the compressed logs faster this…

> No

Okay well it's a chat app where you chat directly with an LLM. The way LLMs work is you feed the entire chat history into it, and it generates the next message. Therefore, there's no way you can chat with it without storing the history. It's impossible

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