The hardest problem in computer science in 2025 is convincing people that you aren't loading every piece of their personal data into a machine learning training run.
The cynic in me wonders if part of Anthropic's decision process here was that, since nobody believes you when you say you're not using their data for training, you may as well do it anyway!
Giving people an opt-out might even increase trust, since people can now at least see an option that they control.
> The cynic in me wonders if part of Anthropic's decision process here was that, since nobody believes you when you say you're not using their data for training, you may as well do it anyway!
This is why I love-hate Anthro, the same way I love-hate Apple. The reason is simple: Great product, shitty MBA-fueled managerial decisions.
I don't understand this mindset. Why would you assume anything? It took me a couple minutes at most to check when I first started using Claude.
I check when I start using any new service. The cynical assumption that everything's being shared leads to shrugging it off and making no attempt to look for settings.
It only takes a moment to go into settings -> privacy and look.
Because they already used data without permission on a much larger scale, so it's a perfectly logical assumption that they would continue doing so with their users?
Training on everything you can publicly scrape from the internet is a very different thing from training on data that your users submit directly to your service.
Why can't companies be trusted to follow the settings?
If they add those settings why would you expect they wouldn't respect them? Do you think they're purely cosmetic features that don't actually do anything?
So your assumption is that the reported privacy policy of any company is completely accurate. There there is no means for the company to violate this policy and that once violated you will immediately be notified.
> It only takes a moment to go into settings -> privacy and look.
It only takes a moment to examine history and observe why this is wholly inadequate.
Jira ticket Nr 97437838. Training service ignores settings, trains on your data anyway. Priority: extremely low. Will probably do it in 2031 when the intern joins.
Because the demand for training data is insatiable and they already are using basically everything available and they need more human generated data and chats with their own LLM is a perfect source.
This. It's the same innocence of people who believe when you delete a document on Google/META/Apple/Microsoft servers, it "really" gets deleted. Google most likely has a backup of every piece of information indexed by them in the last 20 years or so. It would cause envy to the Internet Archive.
With the privacy laws out there, I do genuinely think they eventually get purged even from backups. I remember there being a really cool YouTube video shared here on HN that google no longer has publicly, it was about the process of an email and all the behind the scenes things, like physical security into a data center, to their patented hard drive shredders they use once the hard drives are to be tossed. I wish Google had kept that video public and online, it was a great watch.
I know once you delete something on Discord its poof, and that's the end of that. I've reported things that if anyone at Discord could access a copy of they would have called police. There's a lot of awful trolls on chat platforms that post awful things.
> I know once you delete something on Discord its poof, and that's the end of that. I've reported things that if anyone at Discord could access a copy of they would have called police. There's a lot of awful trolls on chat platforms that post awful things.
That's not what Discord themselves say, is that coming from Discord, the police or someone else?
> Once you delete content, it will no longer be available to other users (though it may take some time to clear cached uploads). Deleted content will also be deleted from Discord’s systems, but we may retain content longer if we have a legal obligation to preserve it as described below. Public posts may also be retained for 180 days to two years for use by Discord as described in our Privacy Policy (for example, to help us train models that proactively detect content that violates our policies). - https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/5431812448791-...
Seems to be something that decides if the content should be deleted faster, or kept for between 180 days - 2 years. So even for Discord, "once you delete something on Discord its poof" isn't 100% accurate.
My understanding is that for Gmail specifically, they keep a record of every email ever received regardless of deletion status, but I'm not able to find any good sources.
Officially, up to you if you believe they are following their policies, all of the companies have published statements on how long they keep their data after deletion (which customers broadly want to support recovery if something goes wrong).
TBH, I'd be surprised if they kept significant amounts around for longer, for the simple reason that it costs money. Yes, drives are cheap, but the electricity to keep them online for months and years is definitely not free, and physical space is not infinite. This is also why some of their services have pretty aggressive deletion policies (like recordings in MS Teams, etc).
Same, I thought the free accounts were always trained on. Which in my opinion is reasonable since you could delete the data you didn’t want to keep on the service.
But including paid accounts and doing 5 year retention however is confounding.
I mean, I am sure there are individuals, who still believe in the basic value of the word within the framework of our civilization, but, having seen those words not just twisted beyond recognition to fit a specific idea, but simply ignored when they were no longer convenient, it would be a surprise now that a cynical stance is not more common.
The question is: how does that affect their choices. How much ends up being gated what previously would have ended up in the open?
Me: I am using a local variant ( and attempting to build something I think I can control better ).
The hardest problem in computer science in 2025 is convincing people that you aren't loading every piece of their personal data into a machine learning training run.
The cynic in me wonders if part of Anthropic's decision process here was that, since nobody believes you when you say you're not using their data for training, you may as well do it anyway!
Giving people an opt-out might even increase trust, since people can now at least see an option that they control.
> The cynic in me wonders if part of Anthropic's decision process here was that, since nobody believes you when you say you're not using their data for training, you may as well do it anyway!
This is why I love-hate Anthro, the same way I love-hate Apple. The reason is simple: Great product, shitty MBA-fueled managerial decisions.
I don't understand this mindset. Why would you assume anything? It took me a couple minutes at most to check when I first started using Claude.
I check when I start using any new service. The cynical assumption that everything's being shared leads to shrugging it off and making no attempt to look for settings.
It only takes a moment to go into settings -> privacy and look.
>Why would you assume anything?
Because they already used data without permission on a much larger scale, so it's a perfectly logical assumption that they would continue doing so with their users?
I don't think that logically makes sense.
Training on everything you can publicly scrape from the internet is a very different thing from training on data that your users submit directly to your service.
4 replies →
Huh, they’re not assuming anything is “being shared”.
They’re assuming that Anthropic that is already receiving and storing your data, is also training their models on that data.
How are you supposed to disprove that as a user?
Also, the whole point is that companies cannot be trusted to follow the settings.
Why can't companies be trusted to follow the settings?
If they add those settings why would you expect they wouldn't respect them? Do you think they're purely cosmetic features that don't actually do anything?
5 replies →
> I check when I start using any new service.
So your assumption is that the reported privacy policy of any company is completely accurate. There there is no means for the company to violate this policy and that once violated you will immediately be notified.
> It only takes a moment to go into settings -> privacy and look.
It only takes a moment to examine history and observe why this is wholly inadequate.
> It only takes a moment to go into settings -> privacy and look.
Do you have any reason to think this does anything?
Jira ticket Nr 97437838. Training service ignores settings, trains on your data anyway. Priority: extremely low. Will probably do it in 2031 when the intern joins.
1 reply →
Because the demand for training data is insatiable and they already are using basically everything available and they need more human generated data and chats with their own LLM is a perfect source.
A silicon valley startup would never say one thing and then do another!
Bro really thinks privacy settings work
This. It's the same innocence of people who believe when you delete a document on Google/META/Apple/Microsoft servers, it "really" gets deleted. Google most likely has a backup of every piece of information indexed by them in the last 20 years or so. It would cause envy to the Internet Archive.
With the privacy laws out there, I do genuinely think they eventually get purged even from backups. I remember there being a really cool YouTube video shared here on HN that google no longer has publicly, it was about the process of an email and all the behind the scenes things, like physical security into a data center, to their patented hard drive shredders they use once the hard drives are to be tossed. I wish Google had kept that video public and online, it was a great watch.
I know once you delete something on Discord its poof, and that's the end of that. I've reported things that if anyone at Discord could access a copy of they would have called police. There's a lot of awful trolls on chat platforms that post awful things.
> I know once you delete something on Discord its poof, and that's the end of that. I've reported things that if anyone at Discord could access a copy of they would have called police. There's a lot of awful trolls on chat platforms that post awful things.
That's not what Discord themselves say, is that coming from Discord, the police or someone else?
> Once you delete content, it will no longer be available to other users (though it may take some time to clear cached uploads). Deleted content will also be deleted from Discord’s systems, but we may retain content longer if we have a legal obligation to preserve it as described below. Public posts may also be retained for 180 days to two years for use by Discord as described in our Privacy Policy (for example, to help us train models that proactively detect content that violates our policies). - https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/5431812448791-...
Seems to be something that decides if the content should be deleted faster, or kept for between 180 days - 2 years. So even for Discord, "once you delete something on Discord its poof" isn't 100% accurate.
2 replies →
My understanding is that for Gmail specifically, they keep a record of every email ever received regardless of deletion status, but I'm not able to find any good sources.
1 reply →
Officially, up to you if you believe they are following their policies, all of the companies have published statements on how long they keep their data after deletion (which customers broadly want to support recovery if something goes wrong).
- Google: active storage for "around 2 months from the time of deletion" and in backups "for up to 6 months": https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention?hl=en-US
- Meta: 90 days: https://www.meta.com/help/quest/609965707113909/
- Apple/iCloud: 30 days: https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/delete-files-mm3b7fcd...
- Microsoft: 30-180 days: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assur...
So if it ends up that they are storing data longer there can be consequences (GDPR, CCPA, FTC).
TBH, I'd be surprised if they kept significant amounts around for longer, for the simple reason that it costs money. Yes, drives are cheap, but the electricity to keep them online for months and years is definitely not free, and physical space is not infinite. This is also why some of their services have pretty aggressive deletion policies (like recordings in MS Teams, etc).
Same, I thought the free accounts were always trained on. Which in my opinion is reasonable since you could delete the data you didn’t want to keep on the service.
But including paid accounts and doing 5 year retention however is confounding.
I mean, I am sure there are individuals, who still believe in the basic value of the word within the framework of our civilization, but, having seen those words not just twisted beyond recognition to fit a specific idea, but simply ignored when they were no longer convenient, it would be a surprise now that a cynical stance is not more common.
The question is: how does that affect their choices. How much ends up being gated what previously would have ended up in the open?
Me: I am using a local variant ( and attempting to build something I think I can control better ).
You are not.
You wouldn’t have needed to assume if you had read their previous policy.
... and your assumptions were wrong until now. Not sure that's much of a dunk as you think it seems
Nope. I always assumed they were and acted accordingly.