Comment by silveraxe93

3 months ago

No it's not. It's literally a court order mandating them to collect this data.

- [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/openai-offers-20...

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silveraxe93

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otterley  3 months ago

This article says nothing of the sort. The court order is to preserve existing logs they already have, not to disable logging, and hand all the logs over the plaintiffs. OpenAI's objections are mainly that 1/there are too many logs (so they're proposing a sample instead) and that 2/there's identifying data in the logs and so they are being "forced" to anonymize the logs at their expense (even though it's what they want as a condition of transferring the logs).

There is nothing in the article that mentions OpenAI being forced to create new logs they don't already have.

  • rpdillon  3 months ago

    This response is misleading. Almost all computer services keep logs for a short period of time, so the court order to retain existing information is quite a bit more powerful than a layman would think. Because a huge amount of data is retained for a short period of time and then rapidly deleted in most web services I've worked on for the past 30 years.

    This is true in services like Datadog, New Relic, and logging services like Splunk. But even privacy-focused services like Mullvad keep logs for 24 hours to monitor for abuse. So this concept that retaining logs is significantly weaker than not ordering the collection is really a bit of misdirection. I'm not sure whether it's intentional, but it's definitely misleading.

    • otterley  3 months ago

      There is an important distinction that relates to a court’s ability to order a defendant to perform work to facilitate discovery. A court can order preservation of records, but they generally cannot order a defendant to create new ones. I was responding to your use of the word “collect,” which implies significantly more effort than merely not destroying logs (i.e. logging new information that they weren’t already).

      It’s not misdirection or misleading; it lies in an understanding of the law. There’s plenty of case law out there on the subject if you’re interested.

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    • cestith  3 months ago

      Well, don’t get yourself sued and you won’t have to perform discovery for the plaintiffs.

  • silveraxe93  3 months ago

    [flagged]

    • pclmulqdq  3 months ago

      If OpenAI truly didn't keep conversation records for any length of time, they would not be subject to this kind of order. Lots of stateless services get these and are able to defeat them because they never store the user's data. The fact that they store them at all means that they are in scope for a preservation order. It also means that they are in scope for all manner of usage by OpenAI themselves even if a user requests deletion.

      2 replies →