And wrapper-around-ChatGPT startups should double-check their privacy policies, that all the "you have no privacy" language is in place.
If a court orders you to preserve user data, could you be sued for preserving user data? Regardless of your privacy policy.
A court ordering you to stop selling pigeons doesn't mean you can keep your store for pigeons open and pocket the money without delivering pigeons.
> Legal Requirements: If required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to (i) comply with a legal obligation, including to meet national security or law enforcement requirements, (ii) protect and defend our rights or property, (iii) prevent fraud, (iv) act in urgent circumstances to protect the personal safety of users of the Services, or the public, or (v) protect against legal liability.
- They are legally obligated to divulge that data to the government
- Once they do so, they are civilly liable for breach of contract, as they have committed to never divulging this data. This may trigger additional breaches of contract, as others may have not had the right to share data with a company that can share it with third parties
Your users aren't obligated to know that you're using open ai or other provider.
This, however, is horrible for AI regardless of whether or not you can sue.
No, because you turn up to court and show the court order.
It's possible a subsequent case could get the first order overturned, but you can't be held liable for good faith efforts to comply with court orders.
However, if you're operating internationally, then suddenly it's possible that you may be issued competing court orders both of which are "valid". This is the CLOUD Act problem. In which case the only winning move becomes not to play.
For example, if there are business consequences for leaking customer data, you better run that LLM yourself.
There are multinational corporations with heavy presence in Europe, that run their whole business on Microsoft cloud, including keeping and processing there privacy-sensitive data, business-critical data and medical data, and yes, that includes using some of this data with LLMs - hosted on Azure. Companies of this size cannot ignore regulatory compliance and hope no one notices. This only works because MS figured out how to keep it compliant.
Point being, if there are business consequences, you'll be better off using Azure-hosted LLMs than running a local model yourself - they're just better than you or me at this. The only question is, whether you can afford it.
Microsoft v. United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._United_Stat...) showed the government wants, and was willing to do whatever required, access to data held in the E.U. The passing of the CLOUD Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act) basically codified it in to law.
sure, theoretically kyc and aml are good, the implementations all suck.
Of course, it could be just all talk, like all general European globalist talks, and Europe will do a 360 once a more friendly party takes over the US.
Just hyperbole, but it seems the regulations are designed with the big cloud providers in mind, but then why don't they just ban US big tech and roll out the regulations more slowly? This neoliberalism makes everything so unnecessarily complicated.
If Solows paradox is true and not the result of bad measurement, then one might expect that it could be workable without sacrificing much productivity. Certainly abandoning the cloud would be possible if the regulatory environment allowed for rapid development of alternative non-cloud solutions, as I really don't think the cloud improved productivity (besides for software developers in certain cases) and is more of a rent seeking mechanism (hot take on hacker news I'm sure, but look at any big corpo IT dept outside the tech industry and I think you will see tons of instances where modern tech like the cloud is causing more problems than it's worth productivity-wise).
Computers in general I am much less sure of and lean towards mismeasurement hypothesis. I suspect any "return to 1950" project would render a company economically less competitive (except in certain high end items) and so the EU would really need to lean on Linux hard and invest massively in domestic hardware (not a small task as the US is finding out) in order to escape the clutches of the US and/or China.
I don't think they have the political will to do it, but I would love it if they tried and proved naysayers wrong.
The European Court of Justice ruled at least twice that it doesn't matter what kind of contract they give you, and what kind of bilateral agreement there are between the US and the EU, as long as the US have the patriot act and later regulations, using Microsoft means it's violating European privacy laws.
Yes, and that's why the European Commission keeps being pushed back by the Court of Justice of the EU (the Safe Harbor was ruled out, Privacy Shield as well, and it's likely a matter of time before the CJEU kills the Data Privacy Framework as well), but when it takes 3-4 years to get a ruling and then the Commission can just make a new (illegal) framework that will last for a couple years, the violation can carry on indefinitely.
This is learned helplessness and it’s only true if you don’t put any effort into building that expertise.
You're right, I should get right to it. Plenty of time for it after work, especially if I cut down HN time.
I'm quite uninterested in your 'advice' which comes from a place of ignorance regarding my relationship with the project, the company and the people.
Technically you could probably just run it on EC2, but then you’d still need HIPPA compliance
But at least if you use an API in the same region as your customers, court order shenanigans won't get you caught between different jurisdictions.
For most tasks I don't need the best model in existence, I just need good enough. A small law firm using LLMs for summaries can probably do it on prem and hire a smart college student to setup a PC to do it.
The problem is that's still more difficult ( let's say our hypothetical junior IT only makes 60k a year) than just sending all your private business information to some 3rd party API. You can then act shocked and concerned when your 3rd party leaks the data.
Point 1: Every company has profit incentive to sell the data in the current political climate, all they need is a sneaky way to access it without getting caught. That includes the combo of LLM provider and Escrow non-entity.
Point 2: No company has profit incentive to defend user privacy, or even the privacy of other businesses. So who could run the Escrow service? Another business? Then they have incentive to cheat and help the LLM provider access the data anyway. The government (and which one)? Their intelligence arms want the data just as much as any company does so you're back to square one again.
"Knowledge is power" combined with "Knowledge can be copied without anyone knowing" means that there aren't any currencies presently powerful enough to convince any other entity to keep your secrets for you.
But, since, I think, there are mechanisms by which they could keep logs, but in a way they cannot access them, they could still claim you will have privacy this way - even though they have the option to keep un-encrypted log, much like they could retain the logs in the first place. So the messaging may remain pretty much the same - from "we promise to delete your logs and keep no other copies, trust us" to "we promise to 3p-encrypt your archived logs and keep no other copies, trust us".
> No company has profit incentive to defend user privacy, or even the privacy of other businesses.
> They have incentive to cheat and help the LLM provider access the data anyway
Why would a company whose role is that of a 3p escrow be incentivised to risk their reputation by doing this? If that's the case every company holding PII has the same problem.
> Their intelligence arms want the data
In the EU at least, GDPR or similar. If you explicit law breaking, that's a more general problem. But what company has a "intelligence arms" in this manner? Are you talking about another big-tech corp?
I'd say this type of cheating it's be a risky proposition from the POV from that 3pe - it'd destroy their business, and they'd be penalised heavily b/c sharing keys is pretty explicitly illegal - any company caught could maybe reduce their own punishment by providing the keys as evidence of the 3pe crime. A viable 3pe business would also need multiple client companies to be viable, so you'd need all of them to play ball - a single whistle-blower in any of them will get you caught, and again, all they need is a single key to prove your guilt.
> "Knowledge is power" combined with "Knowledge can be copied without anyone knowing" means that there aren't any currencies presently powerful enough to convince any other entity to keep your secrets for you.
On that same basis, large banks could cheat the stock market; but there is regulation in place to address that somewhat.
Maybe 3p-escrows should be regulated more, or required to register as a currently-regulated type. That said, if you want to protect data from the government, prism etc, you're SOOL, no one can stop them cheating. let's focus on big-/tech/-startup cheats.
You> But what company has a "intelligence arms" in this manner? Are you talking about another big-tech corp?
"Their" in this circumstance refers to any government that might try to back Escrow.
Then I refer to my comment on prism: "if you want to protect data from the government, prism etc, you're SOOL, no one can stop them cheating. let's focus on big-/tech/-startup cheats."
Though you talk about "backing" escrow, I mean regulating. The government otherwise controls all business and society. How is it any different to the banks, sec companies etc in that respect.
I've reviewed a lot of SaaS contracts over the years.
Nearly all of them have clauses that allow the vendor to do whatever they have to if ordered to by the government. That doesn't make it okay, but it means OpenAI customers probably don't have a legal argument, only a philosophical argument.
Same goes for privacy policies. Nearly every privacy policy has a carve out for things they're ordered to do by the government.
Really, it’s funny watching from the outside and waiting for English to finally stop holding it in and get itself some sort of spelling reform to meaningfully move in a phonetic direction. My amateur impression, though, is that mandatory secondary education has made “correct” spelling such a strong social marker that everybody (not just English-speaking countries) is essentially stuck with whatever they have at the moment. In which case, my condolences to English speakers, your history really did work out in an unfortunate way.
That said, phonetic spelling reform would of course privilege the phonemes as spoken by whoever happens to be most powerful or prestigious at the time (after all, the only way it could possibly stick is if it's pushed by the sufficiently powerful), and would itself fall out of date eventually anyway.
Isn't the "a" in "have" elided along with the "h?"
Shouldn't've Should not have
What am I missing?
Also I have always liked this humorous plan for spelling reform: https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm
English popularity was solely and exclusively driven by its use as a lingua franca. As times change, so too will the language we speak.
There are certainly languages with even more spoken complexity - e.g. 4+ consonant clusters like "vzdr" typical of Slavic - but even so spoken English is not that easy to learn to understand, and very hard to learn to speak without a noticeable accent.
So, its something like:
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be [replased](replaced) either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.
A phonetic respelling would destroy the languages, because there are too many dialects without matching pronunciations. Though rendering historical texts illegible, a phonemic approach would work: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_pronunciatio... But that would still mean most speakers have 2-3 ways of spelling various vowels. There are some further problems with a phonemic approach: https://alexalejandre.com/notes/phonetic-vs-phonemic-spellin...
Here's an example of a phonemic orthography, which is somewhat readable (to me) but illustrates how many diacritics you'd need. And it still spells the vowel in "ask" or "lot" with the same ä! https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
Not only that, but since pronunciation tends to diverge over time, it will create a never-ending spelling-pronunciation drift where the same words won't be pronounced the same in, e.g. 100-200 years, which will result in future generations effectively losing easy access to the prior knowledge.
Once you switch to a phonetic respelling this is no longer a frequent problem. It does not happen, or at least happens very rarely with existing phonetic languages such as Turkish.
In the rare event that the pronunciation of a sound changes in time, the spelling doesn't have to change. You just pronounce the same letter differently.
If it's more than one sound, well, then you have a problem. But it happens in today's non-phonetic English as well (such as "gost" -> "ghost", or more recently "popped corn" -> "popcorn").
Oh, but it does. It's just the standard is held as the official form of the language and dialects are killed off through standardized education etc. To do this in English would e.g. force all Australians, Englishmen etc. to speak like an American (when in the UK different cities and social classes have quite divergent usage!) This clearly would not work and would cause the system to break apart. English exhibits very minor diaglossia, as if all Turkic peoples used the same archaic spelling but pronounced it their own ways, e.g. tāg, kök, quruq, yultur etc. which Turks would pronounce as dāg, gök, yıldız etc. but other Turks today say gurt for kurt, isderik, giderim okula... You just say they're "wrong" because the government chose a standard and (Turkic people's outside of Turkey weren't forced to use it.)
As a native English speaker, I'm not even sure how to pronounce "either" (how it should be done in my dialect) and seemingly randomly reduce sounds. We'd have to change a lot of things before being able to agree on a single right version and slowly making everyone speak like that.
Nor is it some kind of insurmountable barrier to communication. For example, Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are all idiolects of the same language with some differences in phonemes (like i/e/ije) and the corresponding differences in standard orthographies, but it doesn't preclude speakers from understanding each other's written language anymore so than it precludes them from understanding each other's spoken language.
are based on the exact same Štokavian dialect, ignoring Kajkavian, Čajkavian, Čakavian and Torlakian dialects. There is _no_ difference in standard orthography, because yat reflexes have nothing to do with national boundaries. Plenty of Serbs speak Ijekavian, for example. Here is a dialect map: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fc...
Your example is literally arguing that Australian English should have the same _phonetic_ orthography, even. But Australian English must have the same orthography or else Australia will no longer speak English in 2-3 generations. The difference between Australian and American English is far larger than between modern varieties of naš jezik. Australians code switches talking to foreigners while Serbs and Croats do not.
But there is, though, e.g. "dolijevati" vs "dolivati". And sure, standard Serbian/Montenegrin allows the former as well, but the latter is not valid in standard Croatian orthography AFAIK. That this doesn't map neatly to national borders is irrelevant.
If Australian English is so drastically different that Australians "won't speak English in 2-3 generations" if their orthography is changed to reflect how they speak, that would indicate that their current orthography is highly divergent from the actual spoken language, which is a problem in its own right. But I don't believe that this is correct - Australian English content (even for domestic consumption, thus no code switching) is still very much accessible to British and American English speakers, so any orthography that would reflect the phonological differences would be just as accessible.
> current orthography is highly divergent from the actual spoken language, which is a problem in its own right
The orthography is no more divergent to an Australians speech as to an American's speech, let alone a Londoner or Oxfordian. But why would it be a problem?
Sorry, I didn't mean that it would be a smooth transition. It might even be impossible. What I wrote above is (paraphrasing myself) "Once you switch to a phonetic respelling [...] pronunciation [will not] tend to diverge over time [that much]". "Once you switch" is the key.
> To do this in English would e.g. force all Australians, Englishmen etc. to speak like an American
Why? There is nothing that prevents Australians from spelling some words differently (as we currently do, e.g. colour vs color, or tyre vs tire).
Consider three English words that have survived over the multiple centuries and their respective pronunciation in Old English (OE), Middle English around the vowel shift (MidE) and modern English, using the IPA: «knight», «through» and «daughter»:
«knight»: [knixt] or [kniçt] (OE) ↝ kniçt] or [knixt] (MidE) ↝ [naɪt] (E)
«through»: [θurx] (OE) ↝ [θruːx] or [θruɣ] (MidE) ↝ [θruː] (E)
«daughter»: [ˈdoxtor] (OE) ↝ [ˈdɔuxtər] or [ˈdauxtər] (MidE) ↝ [ˈdɔːtə] (E)
Regular re-spelling results in a loss of the linguistic continuity, and particularly so over a span of a few or more centuries.
There are occasional mixed horrors like "ptarmigan", which is a Gaelic word which was Romanized using Greek phonology, so it has the same silent p as "pterodactyl".
There's no academy of the English language anyway, so there's nobody to make such a change. And as others have said, the accent variation is pretty huge.
Just because training on data is opt out doesn't mean business can't trust it. Not the best for user's privacy though.
Like there's the algorithm by which a hedge fund is doing algorithmic trading, they'd be insane to take the risk. Then there's the code for a video game, it's proprietary, but competitors don't benefit substantially from an illicit copy. You ship the compiled artifacts to everyone, so the logic isn't that secret. Copies of the similar source code have linked before with no significant effects.
Many algo strategies are indeed programmatically simple (e.g. use some sort of moving average), but the parametrization and how it's used is the secret sauce and you don't want that information to leak. They might be tuned to exploit a certain market behavior, and you want to keep this secret since other people targeting this same behavior will make your edge go away. The edge can be something purely statistical or it can be a specific timing window that you found, etc.
It's a bit like saying that a Formula 1 engine is not that far from what you'd find in a textbook. While it's true that it shares a lot of properties with a generic ICE, the edge comes from a lot of proprietary research that teams treat as secret and definitely don't want competitors to find out.
A lot of the use is fairly mundane and basically replaces junior analysts. E.g. it's digesting and summarizing the insane amounts of research that is produced. I could ask an intern to summarize the analysis on platinum prices over the last week, and it'll take them a day. Alternatively, I can feed in all the analysis that banks produce to an LLM and have it done immediately. The data fed in is not a trade secret really, and neither is the output. What I do with the results is where the interesting things happen.
They can still have legal contracts with other companies, that stipulate that they don't train on any of their data.
It's one thing if you get pwned because a hacker broke into your servers. It is another thing if you get pwned because a hacker broken into somebody else's servers.
At this point, do we believe OpenAI has a strong security infrastructure? Given the court order, it doesn't seem possible for them to have sufficient security for practical purposes. Your data might be encrypted at rest, but who has the keys? When you're buying secure instances, you don't want the provider to have your keys...
Look at it this way. If you your phone was stolen would you want it to self destruct or keep everything? (Assume you can decide to self destruct it) clearly the latter is safer. Maybe the data has been pulled off and you're already pwned. But by deleting, if they didn't get the data they now won't be able to.
You just don't want to give adversaries infinite time to pwn you
There's a qualitative difference resulting from quantitatively much easier access (querying some database vs. having to physically look through court records) and processing capabilities (an army of lawyers reading millions of pages vs. anyone, via an LLM) that doesn't seem to be accounted for.
Of course I haven’t sent anything actually sensitive to ChatGTP, but the use of copyright law in order to enforce a stricter surveillance regime is giving very strong “Right to Read” vibes.
> each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.)
> It didn’t matter whether you did anything harmful—the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was.
Do search engine companies have this requirement as well? I remember back in the old days deanonymizing “anonymous” query logs was interesting. I can’t imagine there’s any secrecy left today.
Well, it is gonna be all _AI Companies_ very soon so unless everyone switches to local models which don't really have the same degree of profitability as a SaaS, its probably not going to kill a company to have less user privacy because tbh people are used to not having privacy these days on the internet.
It certainly will kill off the few companies/people trusting them with closed source code or security related stuff but you really should not outsource that anywhere.
For now. This is going to devolve into either "openAI has to do this, so you do too" or "we shouldn't have to do this because nobody else does!" and my money is not on the latter outcome.
> —after news organizations suing over copyright claims accused the AI company of destroying evidence.
Like, none of the AI companies are going to avoid copyright related lawsuits long term until things are settled law.
See the whole LIBOR chat business.
They have a fair bit. Local models lets companies sell you a much more expensive bit of hardware. Once Apple gets their stuff together it could end up being a genius move to go all in on local after the others have repeated scandals of leaking user data.
And how many companies have proprietary code hosted on Github?
We've always done self-hosted as old as things like gerrit and what not that aren't even really feature complete as competitors where I've worked.
As far as I understand it, this ruling does not apply to Microsoft, does it?
https://x.com/paulg/status/1913338841068404903
"It's a very exciting time in tech right now. If you're a first-rate programmer, there are a huge number of other places you can go work rather than at the company building the infrastructure of the police state."
---
So, courts order the preservation of AI logs, and government orders the building of a massive database. You do the math. This is such an annoying time to be alive in America, to say the least. PG needs to start blogging again about what's going on now days. We might be entering the digital version of the 60s, if we're lucky. Get local, get private, get secure, fight back.
This raises serious questions about the supposed "anonymization" of chat data used for training their new models, i.e. when users leave the "improve model for all users" toggle enabled in the settings (which is the default even for paying users). So, indeed, very bad for the current business model which appears to rely on present users (voluntarily) "feeding the machine" to improve it.
[0] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/NYT-v...
So, the NYT asked for this back in January and the court said no, but asked OpenAI if there was a way to accomplish the preservation goal in a privacy-preserving manner. OpenAI refused to engage for 5 f’ing months. The court said “fine, the NYT gets what they originally asked for”.
Nice job guys.
> That risk extended to users of ChatGPT Free, Plus, and Pro, as well as users of OpenAI’s application programming interface (API), OpenAI said.
This seems very bad for their business.