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Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

(openai.com)
256 points meetpateltech | 8 comments | 12 Nov 25 14:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.829s | 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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Aurornis ◴[12 Nov 25 18:53 UTC] No.45904285[source]▶
> What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations

Your previous ChatGPT conversations show up right in the ChatGPT interface.

They have to store the private conversations to enable users to bring them up in the interface.

This isn't a secretive, hidden data collection. It's a clear and obvious feature right in the product. They're fighting for the ability to not retain secret records of past conversations that have been deleted.

The problem with the court order is that it requires them to keep the conversations even after a user presses the 'Delete' button on them.

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1. baobun ◴[12 Nov 25 22:09 UTC] No.45907525[source]▶
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.

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2. thorum ◴[12 Nov 25 22:23 UTC] No.45907701[source]▶
> 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.
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3. JCM9 ◴[12 Nov 25 23:18 UTC] No.45908288[source]▶
This sort of thing is pretty trivial to implement from the start, they just chose not to because they wanted the data themselves
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4. cush ◴[13 Nov 25 00:27 UTC] No.45908889[source]▶
This doesn’t sound realistic. Signal is end to end encrypted and only sends one message at a time, while ChatGPT needs the entire chat context for every message and they need to decrypt your messages in their services in order to feed them into the LLM.
5. nl ◴[13 Nov 25 00:27 UTC] No.45908891[source]▶
Signal does End-to-end encryption, so they (Signal) can never read it.

The whole point of ChatGPT conversations is so they can be read by the model on the server.

Conversations are kept around because they can be picked up and continued at any point (I use this feature frequently).

Additionally you can use conversations in their scheduled notification feature, where the conversation is replayed and updates are sent to you, all done on the server.

> OpenAI made a choice in how the feature was and is implemented.

Indeed they did, and it was a sensible choice given how the conversations are used.

6. ◴[13 Nov 25 00:33 UTC] No.45908934{3}[source]▶
7. cush ◴[13 Nov 25 00:34 UTC] No.45908953[source]▶
People are responding in this thread as if ChatGPT is a one-on-one conversation with another person. The data isn’t “shared” with OpenAI. You’re chatting with OpenAI. ChatGPT is just a service. There’s no way to use ChatGPT without sharing all of your chats with OpenAI, that’s what the entire product is.
8. cruffle_duffle ◴[13 Nov 25 01:06 UTC] No.45909170{3}[source]▶
Hah. I seriously doubt it is even close to trivial. Especially when they are to exist on any device you use the service from.