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Judge Orders OpenAI to Give Lawyers 20M Private Chats – 'Anonymization'(techdirt.com)
43 points by heisenbit a day ago | 11 comments
  • jazzyjacksona day ago

    never say anything to a cloud hosted chatbot you wouldn't want to see printed in the new york times

  • m463a day ago

    anonymization wouldn't remove personally identifying data typed in. I can think of lots of examples.

  • burnt-resistora day ago

    If it ain't zero knowledge, it's a corporate surveillance state bonanza.

    If it's free or too cheap from a corporation, it's too expensive.

  • busymom0a day ago

    Wouldn't every single American in that 20M people have standing (legal term) to prevent this?

  • ChrisArchitecta day ago

    Related:

    Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45900370

    We analyzed 47,000 ChatGPT conversations. Here's what people use it for

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45902767

  • 4ndrewla day ago

    In what way are these "private chats"?

    These are instructions to a computer-based service that you presumably signed your rights away to when you accepted the T&C's?

    • guiambrosa day ago |parent

      Emails are also instructions to a computer-based service (SMTP) that you presumably signed your rights away to when you accepted the T&Cs.

      Yet no one would think it's acceptable for the NYT and a dozen other news organizations to request an "anonymized" archive of all your emails from provider X, just because said provider is in a lawsuit with them, and you have nothing to do with any of it.

      This is shameful, and would create a dangerous precedent. Really hope the order gets struck down.

      • 4ndrewl16 hours ago |parent

        Well yes, that sort of evidence is routinely used to gather evidence and build criminal cases. Emails, like letters, are correspondence between individuals.

        ChatGPT isn't (despite it's name) equivalent - the nearest analogy is Google. We know the modus operandi of the world based on these services (incl social media) and privacy is the aspect that's been given up.

    • rpdillona day ago |parent

      The linked article is making the point that the judge is claiming that they are preserving privacy with this order because they believe in de-anonymization of the data set. The judge appears to have no understanding of how re-identification works and the history here.

      So while it's an interesting question about whether privacy exists, the point here is that it doesn't exist, but the judge is saying it does.

    • naIaka day ago |parent

      They were chats that were supposed to be private between you and OpenAI, concretely. Nobody, including OpenAI, expected them to ever become public.

      • 4ndrewl16 hours ago |parent

        In the narrative about this the affordance given to OpenAI is staggering and the naivety that "stuff on the web will stay private" is contra to everything we've learnt over the past 25 years though.