Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy

Everyone seems to be unsurprised by this move, but I’m genuinely shocked. What a shoot your own foot business decision. Google, evil though it be, doesn’t post the text of your gmails in its search results because who would consider using Gmail after that? This is the llm equivalent. Am I missing something?

This data is useful for reinforcement learning. All the others do it.

And most importantly, you can just opt-out.

You can't opt out of the data retention policy.

The LLM equivalent is what Google does do, which is train its spam filters on the contents of your emails coupled to the signal of what human beings flag as spam.

(It was one of the first significant value-adds of GMail: at its scale, Google could create a global-concept understanding of the content and pattern of spam across hundreds of millions of users. That was the kind of Big Data that made it possible to build filters where one could confidently say "This is tuned on all spam in the wild, because we've seen all spam in the wild").

> Am I missing something?

I think you do:

According to the article https://www.perplexity.ai/page/anthropic-reverses-privacy-st...

"Enterprise and educational customers will continue operating under their existing privacy protections, as the policy changes specifically exclude Claude for Work and Claude for Education services. These commercial accounts remain governed by separate contractual agreements that maintain stricter data handling standards.

Organizations using Claude through business partnerships or educational licenses can continue their operations without concern for the new training policies affecting their sensitive communications or proprietary information."

Thus, I think your claim

> What a shoot your own foot business decision.

likely does not hold: the non-commercial accounts likely led to Anthropic loosing money, so they are not liked by Anthropic anyway (but are a an "inconvenient necessity" to get people to notice and try out your product offering). With this new decision, Anthropic makes this "free-riding" less attractive.

I bet that Anthropic will soon release a press statement (that exists in the drawers for quite a long time) "We are listening to your concerns, and will thus extend our 'privacy-conscious offering' to new groups of customers. Only 30 $ per month."

Gmail used to serve ads based on your emails for many years until 2017. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/26/534451513...

Ok, to be clear, let’s say I’m dumb and accidentally go with the default (I get the color of the opt out button wrong or something). As if there’s a “publish my private emails to the internet” default-on button in email. Then, I use it to edit a rec letter for student X, with my signature Y. (Yes I know this is dumb and I try changing names when editing but am sure some actual names may slip through.) A few months later the next model is released trained on the data. Student X asks Claude what Y would write in a rec letter about X. Such a button is a “wings stay on / wings fall off” button on a plane.

The data retention period is 30 days if you don't choose to improve model training. https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms...

Google mines the bejeezus out of your email, and uses it to any number of ends, including manipulating you into buying things, and also passing your correspondence on to the US government. While this is not the same as outright making your emails universally searchable - training Claude on your emails is also not the same as posting their contents.

And - this behavior of Google's has not been penalized, I'm afraid.

Just because all the others do it doesn’t make it right. Many users chose Anthropic exactly because they were not like the others.

And in 2010 they made https the default. Different times :)

Oh, I didn't catch this—that's good news

Well, it means that LLMs used for business use cases will be trained on input from non-business use cases of non-privacy-conscious users.

> With this new decision, Anthropic makes this "free-riding" less attractive

Certainly not for any users like you and me, it takes two seconds and three clicks to review the new terms and decline chat training. This is more like Anthropic getting easy training from people who are unaware or don't care.

You're severely overestimating the ability of the model to recall a single mostly uninteresting item from it's billions of input documents.

I don't think https is responsible for that. Google owns the data, it doesn't matter how it is transported. It does, however, matter how it is stored (which I hope is encrypted in a way only you can retrieve it)

Seems the same thing. They're giving plausible deniability, but knowing they'll still scoop up a worthwhile amount of data/profit from some % of users.

Gmail is free. It would still be incredibly bad for Gmail to start publishing the content of free users' emails to Google search.

But also, Anthropic has said that this new policy also applies to their Pro ($20/mo) and Max ($200/mo) plans. So its not free versus not free.

> Many users chose Anthropic exactly because they were not like the others.

Oh the naivety.

Sooner or later they all become the same, soon after "investors" or "shareholders" arrive.

There's no reason to be shocked by the practice however.

> Sooner or later they all become the same, soon after "investors" or "shareholders" arrive.

They already arrived. Google was one of the main investors of Anthro.

What a framing. Like there is exactly a surprise behing all these reactions.

> Many users chose Anthropic exactly because they were not like the others.

Companies are less like people and more like bacteria. They are programmatic, like algorithms.

What they will do has already been decided for them, programmed into them, by the rules of capitalism. It is inevitable. There are no good guys, and there are no bad guys, there's just... microbes.

Those who do not engage in capitalism, perhaps they do not seek money at all, have no such hard limitations. But they are rare, because money is blood.