"Reading stuff freely posted on the internet" is also very different from a business having machines consume large volumes of data posted on the Internet for the purpose of generating value for them without compensating the creators. I'm not making a value judgement one way or the other, but "reading stuff freely posted on the Internet" is an oversimplification.

I'm not talking about that, I'm taking about downloading gigabytes of books, and movies and who knows what data (since it's not disclosed) without paying. Those are not freely posted on the internet. Well, not legally anyways.

Faithfully reproducing something you've previously read while passing it off as your own original work is a violation of the most basic tenets of intellectual property rights.

This is a quintessential bad faith comment.

The reference to terabytes of stolen data refers to copyrighted material. I think you know this but chose to frame it as "stuff freely posted on the internet" in order to mislead and strawman the other comment.

Forgot the 82TB of torrented books Meta has been using for training? I mean, yeah, it’s Meta. No surprise. But I won’t believe for one second that the other players didn’t do a similar thing. They just haven’t been caught yet.

so I can take a screenshot from a movie trailer on YouTube and sell posters of it now? I thought copyright still applied to the poor.

What "reading"?

You don't have to assume people are going to be bad, but it's reasonable and prudent to expect it from people who have already shown themselves to be so (in this context).

I trust people until they give me cause to do otherwise.

You can and should safely assume people can do anything that's possible to do. Weather something is bad or good is a term of historical debate.

> 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.

>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?

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.

> 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.

A silicon valley startup would never say one thing and then do another!

> It only takes a moment to go into settings -> privacy and look.

Do you have any reason to think this does anything?

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.

Bro really thinks privacy settings work

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.

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).

Not the OP but…

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/healthline-media-agrees-to...

"Healthline.com provided an opt-out mechanism, but it was misconfigured and Healthline failed to test it, resulting in data being shared with third parties even after consumers elected to opt out.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65772154

"The company agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after it was accused of failing to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents.”

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/405635/califo...

"According to the [California Privacy Protection] agency, Todd Snyder told website visitors they could opt out of data sharing, but didn't actually allow them to do so for 40 days in late 2023 because its opt-out mechanism was improperly configured."

That’s impossible. You can’t anonymize data at scale.

I expect that's a very weak signal. When I ask a question and get a completely wrong answer from Claude I usually drop the chat and look elsewhere.

In general, I think any human generated content in pre-2022 is valuable because someone did some kind of validation (think about stack overflow answer with user confirming that a specific answer fixed their problem).

If they start to feed the next model with LLM generated crap, the overall performance will drop and instead of getting a useful answer 1 of 5 it will be 1 of 10(?) and probably a lot of us will cancel the subscription ... so in the end I think it matters.

You want them to flush your conversations on your own schedule. That I can understand. If you delete a conversation it should be DELETED.

> Is it cheaper?

"ccusage" is telling me I would have spent $2010.90 in the last month if I was paying via the API, rather than $200.

But also I do feel Claude Code is quite a bit better than other things I've used, when using the same model. I'm not sure why though, it's a fairly simple program with only a few prompts and only a few tools, it seems like others could catch up immediately by learning some lessons from it.

According to Claude cost I get about 5x value in token cost by having a max subscription.

I upgraded after I hit the equivalent spend in API fees in a month.

How do you feel about this data being used to target advertising at you in the inevitable rush to monetize these AI products?

I'm used to doing the same task 4 or 5 times (different sessions, similar prompts), and most of the time the result is useless or completely wrong. Sometimes I go back and pick the first result, other time none of them, other time a mix of them. I'm wondering how can they extract value from this.

> Did the session end? Good chance the answer was acceptable.

Or that the user just ragequit

Agree, but people generally take a small pause before saying stuff online.

In 'private', people are less ashamed of their ignorance, and also know they can say gibberish and the AI will figure it out.

Like what?

It's a tool that dependson data mining everything. The only surprise is that they weren't already data mining what people feed into it.

You have it backwards. I'm paying $200/month and so I want the thing to reflect more what I want than what the general public wants. They'd better be mining my data, despite that being a term I haven't heard in over a decade.

Some people were upset that Google Maps would just take the data that contributors give it for free. My problem was different. I use Google Maps and I want a way to correct it. I don't want to be paid for this. I want the tool I'm using to be correctable by me. The more I pay for it, the more I want it to be editable by me. I don't want compensation. I want it to be better. And I can make it better.

It's sort of why we picked Kong at a different company. Open source core meant that we could edit stuff we didn't like. In fact, considering that we paid, we wanted them to upstream what we changed.

what are you doing with the data? What is your legacy going to be other than the data that you leave to be mined? Do you just not want something else to benefit from something that has no benefit to you? If so, why?

Let's say that I use LLM to develop novel software called X. Then my work is used to train the model. Then somebody uses the model to recreate a copy of the of the software X by prompt "create software that works just like X". My novel software is no longer unique. So how come I have not been deprived of anything?

Data retention appears to be predicated on opting in to allowing training. If you don't opt in, they retain it for the same 30 days they were already retaining it for. https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms

> any switch from opt-out-by-default to opt-in-by-default sucks

It’s the reverse. This was opt-in and is now opt-out. Opt means choose so when “the default is opt-in” it means the option is “no” by default and you have the option to make it “yes”.

i think skepticism is healthy, but they've handled this in a fairer way than any other online product i've used before.

they gave me a popup to agree to the ToS change, but I can ignore it for a month and still use the product. In the popup, they clearly explained the opt-out switch, which is available in the popup itself as well as in the settings.

I don't think it's good, but people both here and on reddit are acting like this is some Great Betrayal when it's just a single switch that they prominently present to you. If they're going to make this change, this is exactly how I'd want them to do it.

There's a huge popup the first time you log in now

Maybe in the US. In the UK, I have found obstacles to data sharing codified in the UK law frustrating. I'm reasonably sure some people will have died because of this, that would not have died otherwise. "Otherwise" case being - if they could communicate with the NHS, similarly (via email, whatsapp) to how they communicate in their private and professional lives.

Within the UK NHS and UK private hospital care, these are my personal experiences.

1) Can't email my GP to pass information back-and-forth. GP withholds their email contact, I can't email them e.g. pictures of scans, or lab work reports. In theory they should have those already on their side. In practice they rarely do. The exchange of information goes sms->web link->web form->submit - for one single turn. There will be multiple turns. Most people just give up.

2) MRI scan private hospital made me jump 10 hops before sending me link, so I can download my MRI scans videos and pictures. Most people would have given up. There were several forks in the process where in retrospect could have delayed data DL even more.

3) Blood tests scheduling can't tell me back that scheduled blood test for a date failed. Apparently it's between too much to impossible for them to have my email address on record, and email me back that the test was scheduled, or the scheduling failed. And that I should re-run the process.

4) I would like to volunteer my data to benefit R&D in the NHS. I'm a user of medicinal services. I'm cognisant that all those are helping, but the process of establishing them relied on people unknown to me sharing very sensitive personal information. If it wasn't for those unknown to me people, I would be way worse off. I'd like to do the same, and be able to tell UK NHS "here are, my lab works reports, 100 GB of my DNA paid for by myself, my medical histories - take them all in, use them as you please."

In all cases vague mutterings of "data protection... GDPR..." have been relayed back as "reasons". I take it's mostly B/S. Yes there are obstacles, but the staff could work around if they wanted to. However there is a kernel of truth - it's easier for them to not try to share, it's less work and less risk, so the laws are used as a cover leaf. (in the worst case - an alibi for laziness.)