Comment by hiAndrewQuinn
3 days ago
I'm surprised nobody else has commented on this. This is a very straightforward and useful thing for a small locally runnable model to do.
3 days ago
I'm surprised nobody else has commented on this. This is a very straightforward and useful thing for a small locally runnable model to do.
And also something that it’s dangerous to try to do stochastically.
It's going to be stochastic in some sense whether you want it to be or not, human error never reaches zero percent. I would bet you a penny you'd get better results doing one two-second automated pass + your usual PII redaction than your PII redaction alone.
The advantage of computers was that they didn't make human errors; they did things repeatedly, quickly, and predictably. If I'm going to accept human error, I'd like it to come from a human.
3 replies →
I think the problem is most secrets arn't stochastic; they're determinant. When the user types in the wrong password, it should be blocked. Using a probabilistic model suggests an attacker only now needs to be really close, but not correct.
Sure, there's some math that says being really close and exact arn't a big deal; but then you're also saying your secrets don't need to be exact when decoding them and they absolutely do atm.
Sure looks like a weird privacy veil that sorta might work for some things, like frosted glass, but think of a toilet stall with all frosted glass, are you still comfortable going to the bathroom in there?
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One could chain a regex based system together with this
The alternative being?
From a compliance POV it's not enough. For example: "<NAME PERSON ONE> is president of the United States" is still identifiable even though the name has been redacted.
Since you can't be 100% certain that a filter redacts all personal data, you'd have to make sure that you have measures in place which allow OpenAI to legally process personal data on your behalf. Otherwise you'd technically have a data breach (from a GDPR pov).
And if OpenAI can legally process personal data on your behalf, why bother filtering if processing with filtering is also compliant?
For the confused: this link must have gotten revived or something, I posted this comment a few days ago. Looks like it's getting the accolades I claim it deserves now.
It was put into second-chance pool by moderators. I originally submitted this link a few days ago and today got this (semi?)automated email from HN, an excerpt below:
Same here, this is an incredibly useful thing to have in the toolkit