I'm glad people care about their personal data, I just wished they cared as much when talking about ChatGPT, because in reality if you're not a Chinese dissident living abroad, then OpenAI is much more dangerous to you than the CCP.

> […] in reality if you're not a Chinese dissident living abroad, then OpenAI is much more dangerous to you than the CCP.

Correct.

I laugh a little every time I hear some folks immediately push the “Big Bad China is just trying to steal our data” narrative. My immediate reaction is, “Grab some tea and let’s sit down real quick, so I can tell you what some of our companies right here in America and our government do with our data.”

It’s legal to be opposed to both, you know. At least OpenAI is in my legal jurisdiction.

Agreed. I get that both might have the same level of access to my data but if I was staying in USA, I would be much more okay with my data getting in the hands of an organization which is within the jurisdiction of the democratic country I live in. Also, given the global political scenario, China is considered a competitor/enemy due to opposite ideologies (not my personal opinion) so the choice is obvious. However, whether USA is/will stay a democracy for long is a longer debate.

Some would say being closer to the powerful thing is exactly the risk. i.e. better to be far away from those you give info to.

OpenAI does not have a history of disappearing people and when they return, their attitude has completely changed (see Jack Ma). OpenAI does not have a history of aggression against other nations shipping vessels. OpenAI does not have a history of corporate espionage and IP theft. OpenAI does not have a history of setting up police stations in other nations. OpenAI does not have a history of operating an illegal bio-lab in foreign nations. That's pretty defamatory to compare OpenAI to the CCP. OpenAI does not have a history of spreading a virus that killed millions and pointing fingers at other nations.

Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Sponsoring a genocide… the moral differences between the US and the CCP are imaginary.

About the virus: you really need to be less in the company of people thinking up conspiracy theories. Remember that a pandemic has always been predicted in a 'not if but when' sense.

For the rest of the provided history feats, I can't really tell but most of it appeared indeed in established newschannels.

If we are talking countries here, then all that you've mentioned is done by both sides. If we are talking companies then as far as I know only one of them is developing killer robots (guess which one).

> But if it's for some personal project that you're putting on Github, does it matter?

I don't think the fear is that they'll steal code you'll end putting publicly on GitHub, but everything else. I guess there is some fear that it won't just analyze and process what you currently have open, but might scrape your computer for more data and so on.

I personally don't believe ByteDance would be stupid enough to even attempt exfiltrating files from developers machines, which typically are better protected than the average user computer, just trying to see the perspective of others with a more charitable reading :)

You don't trust the OS do that kind of safeguarding?

Desktop OS's typically don't protect one application's data from another, or the system's data from an application. At least not out of the box without configuring some kind of sandboxing solution.

The user-based permissions model is an outdated dinosaur from a time when we could trust the applications we run on our systems to act on our behalf. Applications now act on the developer's behalf, often against the user. An application "running as me" should not have access to every resource (file or peripheral) on the device that I have access to. That's a huge blast radius.

Operating Systems really need to start treating developers as adversarial from a security/permissions point of view.

Macs have started prompting for confirmation when software requests access to some directories. It’s better than nothing, but the OS doesn’t really have any kind of tutorial explaining how the permissions work and which directories are covered.

Trust em or not … had that happen to someone else using Cursor a few weeks back. I ran a prompt for refactoring a function and all of a sudden it started dumping someone else’s directory structure and file contents into my text file. Like hundreds of files. Not exactly sure what happened but I immediately uninstalled Cursor.

so all your code goes on Github because mine certainly does not