Comment by hluska
6 hours ago
Serious question. Why should someone have more privacy in a software system than they do within their home?
6 hours ago
Serious question. Why should someone have more privacy in a software system than they do within their home?
I have enormous privacy in my home. I can open up any book and read it with nobody logging what I read. I can destroy any notes I take and know they'll stay destroyed. I can even visit the library and do all these things in an environment with massive information access; only the card catalog usage might get logged, and I probably still don't have to tie usage to my identity because once upon a time it was totally normal to make knowledge tools publicly-accessible without the need for authentication credentials.
They maybe (not taking a stance) shouldn't, but I don't think this argument is as simple as one thinks. Doing surveillance on someone's home generally requires a court order beforehand. And depending on the country (I don't believe this applies to the US), words spoken at home also enjoy extended legal protection, i.e. they can't subpoena a friend you had a discussion with.
Now the real question is, do you consider it a conversation or a letter. Any opened¹ letters you have lying around at home can be grabbed with a court-ordered search warrant. But a conversation—you might need the warrant beforehand? It's tricky.
(Again, exact legal situation depends on the country.)
¹ Secrecy of correspondence frequently only applies to letters in sealed envelopes. But then you can get another warrant for the correspondence…
Honest question, why consider the personal home, letters or spoken words at all, considering most countries around the world already have ample and far more applicable laws/precedent for cloud hosted private documents?
For the LLM input, that maps 1:1 to documents a person has written and uploaded to cloud storage. And I don't see how generated output could weigh into that at all.
A simple answer to this is: I use local storage or end-to-end encrypted cloud backup for private stuff, and I don't for work stuff. And I make those decisions on a document-by-document basis, since I have the choice of using both technologies.
The question you are asking is: should I approach my daily search tasks with the same degree of thoughtfulness and caution that I do with my document storage choices, and do I have the same options? And the answers I would give are:
* As a consumer I don't want to have to think about this. I want to be able to answer some private questions or have conversations with a trusted confidant without those conversations being logged to my identity.
* As an OpenAI executive, I would also probably not want my users to have to think about this risk, since a lot of the future value in AI assistants is the knowledge that you can trust them like members of your family. If OpenAI can't provide that, something else will.
* As a member of a society, I really do not love the idea that we're using legal standards developed for 1990s email to protect citizens from privacy violations involving technologies that can think and even testify against you.
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