[Retric]

What privacy specifically? The courts have always been able to compel people to recount things they know which could include a conversation between you and your plumber if it was somehow related to a case.

The company records and uses this stuff internally, retention is about keeping information accurate and accessible.

Lawsuits allow in a limited context the sharing of non public information held by individuals/companies in the lawsuit. But once you submit something to OpenAI it’s now there information not just your information.

[nickff]

I think that some of the people here dislike (or are alarmed by) the way that the court can compel parties to retain data which would otherwise have vanished into the ether.

[lelanthran]

> I think that some of the people here dislike (or are alarmed by) the way that the court can compel parties to retain data which would otherwise have vanished into the ether.

Maybe so, but this has always been the case for hundreds of years.

After all, how on earth do you propose having getting fair hearing if the other party is allowed to destroy the evidence you asked for in your papers?

Because this is what would happen:

You: Your Honour, please ask the other party to turn over all their invoices for the period in question

Other Party: We will turn over only those invoices we have

*Other party goes back to the office and deletes everything.

The thing is, once a party in a suit asks for a certain piece of evidence, the other party can't turn around and say "Our policy is to delete everything, and our policy trumps the orders of this court".

[nickff]

I think your points are all valid, but… On the other hand, this sort of preservation does substantially reduce user privacy, disclosing personal information to unauthorized parties, with no guarantees of security, no audits, and few safeguards.

This is much more concerning (from a privacy perspective) than a company using cookies to track which pages on a website they’ve visited.

[lelanthran]

> On the other hand, this sort of preservation does substantially reduce user privacy,

Yes, that's by design and already hundreds of years old in practice.

You cannot refuse a court evidence to protect your or anyone else's privacy.

I see no reason to make an exception for rich and powerful companies.

I don't want a party to a suit having the ability to suppress evidence due to privacy concerns. There is no privacy once you get to a civil court other than what the court, at its discretion, allows, such as anonymisation.

[Retric]

I disagree because the information has already been recorded and users don’t have a say in who at the company or some random 3rd party the company sells that data to is “authorized” to view data.

It’s the collection itself that’s the problem not how soon it’s deleted as economically worthless.

> with no guarantees of security, no audits, and few safeguards.

The courts pay far more attention to that stuff than profit maximizing entities like OpenAI.

[nickff]

I agree that your assessment of the legal state-of-play is likely accurate. That said it is one thing for data to be cached in the short-term, and entirely different for it to be permanently stored and then sent out to parties which the user has only a distant and likely adversarial relationship with.

There are many situations in which the deletion/destruction of ‘worthless’ data is treated as a security protection. The one that comes to mind is how some countries destroy fingerprint data after it has been used for the creation of a biometric passport. Do you really think this is a futile act?

>”The courts pay far more attention to that stuff than profit maximizing entities like OpenAI.”

I would be interested to see evidence of this. The courts claim to value data security, but I have never seen an audit of discovery-related data storage, and I suspect there are substantial vulnerabilities in the legal system, including the law firms. Can a user hold the court or opposing law firm financially accountable if they fail to safeguard this data? I’ve never seen this happen.

[Retric]

> That said it is one thing for data to be cached in the short-term

Cashed data isn’t necessarily available for data retention to apply in the first place. Just because an ISP has parts of a message in some buffer doesn’t mean it’s considered as a recording of that data. If Google never stores queries beyond what’s needed to serve a response then it likely wouldn’t qualify.

Also, it’s on the entity providing data for the discovery process to do redaction as appropriate. The only way it ends up at the other end is if it gets sent in the first pace. There can be a lot of back and forth here and as to evidence that the courts care: https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_5.2