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Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

(openai.com)
195 points meetpateltech | 7 comments | 12 Nov 25 14:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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1vuio0pswjnm7 ◴[12 Nov 25 16:11 UTC] No.45901917[source]▶
"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

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1. silveraxe93 ◴[12 Nov 25 16:32 UTC] No.45902173[source]▶
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...

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2. sailfast ◴[12 Nov 25 17:16 UTC] No.45902784[source]▶
This is an excellent article and source. Thank you.
3. otterley ◴[12 Nov 25 18:19 UTC] No.45903718[source]▶
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.

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4. silveraxe93 ◴[12 Nov 25 19:14 UTC] No.45904727[source]▶
Are you being intentionally dense? When did anyone say anything about forcing to create logs they don't have?

The court is ordering OpenAI to keep literally all conversations someone has with ChatGPT. It's stopping them from deleting these conversation even if the user requests it. This is not extra logging, it's literally _the_ product.

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5. ◴[12 Nov 25 19:18 UTC] No.45904817{3}[source]▶
6. pclmulqdq ◴[12 Nov 25 19:29 UTC] No.45905022{3}[source]▶
If OpenAI truly didn't keep conversation records for any length of time, they would not be subject to this kind of order. Lots of stateless services get these and are able to defeat them because they never store the user's data. The fact that they store them at all means that they are in scope for a preservation order. It also means that they are in scope for all manner of usage by OpenAI themselves even if a user requests deletion.
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7. dghlsakjg ◴[12 Nov 25 20:46 UTC] No.45906397{4}[source]▶
It seems as if the court has forced OpenAI into collecting logs that they weren't otherwise collecting.

So in this case not keeping logs as ordered by the court would be contempt of court.