[HN Gopher] Lawsuit claims OpenAI stole 'massive amounts of pers...
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Lawsuit claims OpenAI stole 'massive amounts of personal data'
Author : pseudosim
Score : 94 points
Date : 2023-06-30 16:12 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| tedunangst wrote:
| > The data accessed included "private information and private
| conversations, medical data, information about children --
| essentially every piece of data exchanged on the internet it
| could take -- without notice to the owners or users of such data,
| much less with anyone's permission," per the lawsuit.
|
| Why aren't they suing the hosts that allowed the data to be
| stolen? Where's the notice of security breach?
| indymike wrote:
| > Why aren't they suing the hosts that allowed the data to be
| stolen? Where's the notice of security breach?
|
| Taking and allowing something to be taken are two separate
| issues, morally, ethically and legally.
| teeray wrote:
| Probably searching for the deepest pockets
| martin8412 wrote:
| They should sue both. You can't use something just because it's
| available.
| nomel wrote:
| > You can't use something just because it's available.
|
| You sometimes can use things that are available. It's not an
| absolute. See: https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/19/scrapin
| g_public_data_...
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| How dare they use things freely available to everyone on the
| planet?!? The nerve!
| JohnFen wrote:
| You take a derisive tone, but there is a violation of
| expectations here for a lot of people.
|
| All of the stuff I've put on the web, I put there for
| actual people to use. Crawlers and scrapers came around,
| and while I certainly didn't like it or approve of it, it
| was something I put up with. The only defense against it
| was to stop putting things on the web entirely, which
| seemed like an overreaction.
|
| Now, however, the use of that data to train AI (something
| that I consider actively harmful to society in general and
| don't want to support in any way), is a degree too far in
| the pot that's been slowly coming to a boil.
|
| While I do want to give back and contribute to the larger
| body of work available to people, I want it to be available
| to actual people. I don't want it to be available for
| training AI.
|
| I don't see why that's such a ridiculous stance. However,
| it's not legally possible to both make a work available to
| the public and prevent that work from being available for
| other uses. That's a real shame, and that the only
| protection available to me is to no longer have the works
| available publicly, it's loss to everybody.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Is... any of that coded in law somewhere or illegal?
|
| "I don't want it to be available for training AI" is a
| perfectly reasonable personal preference. We can discuss
| whether it's selfish or not, whether others agree or not,
| etc.
|
| But this is a lawsuit. What makes it illegal for OpenAI
| to use your content? Like, is there some license you've
| put up on your content that disallows it? Is there
| anything that's relevant to the case at hand?
| imchillyb wrote:
| > https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/privacy-
| security/child...
|
| > The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)
| gives parents control over what information websites can
| collect from their kids. The COPPA Rule puts additional
| protections in place and streamlines other procedures
| that companies covered by the rule need to follow. The
| COPPA FAQs can help keep your company COPPA compliant.
| Learn about the COPPA Safe Harbor Program and about
| organizations the FTC has approved to implement safe
| harbor programs. You can also get information about ways
| to get verifiable parental consent- including new methods
| the Commission has approved - and the process for seeking
| approval for new methods.
|
| There's one. There are similar laws in Europe.
|
| The AI scraped, utilized, kept, keeps... data on
| children. Parents did not consent. Children /can't/
| consent.
|
| The AI use of such data is not only illegal but could end
| up with people being jailed over it.
| ForestCritter wrote:
| Medical data and data about children have very specific
| protections. The article says these were accessed without
| permission. If a lab tech dropped my lab results on the
| floor and you picked them up, it would not give you the
| right to store and use my information.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I never said it was illegal. I was responding to the
| implication that because you put something publicly on
| the web, it's somehow ridiculous to object to certain
| uses of it.
|
| As to the legality, that remains unknown until a court
| makes a ruling. I suspect that this lawsuit will go
| nowhere, but I'm just speculating along with everyone
| else.
| signatoremo wrote:
| Of course as the data's owner you can object to anything.
| Who is to say that you are not allowed to hate certain
| practice?
|
| On the other hand, you can't prevent people from using
| your data if you put it out in public without condition
| (in the form of some acceptable licenses).
|
| As an analogy, if you put a picture of your living room
| in the sidewalk, you can't prevent me from looking at it,
| study it, when I walk by. I may even benefit from it by
| copying your style or decoration. You may however cover
| it, with a warning. I'd clearly violate your terms if I
| still look at it against your will, although I may not
| violate any laws.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| One could argue copyright, but you'd have to prove this
| was copyright infringement. Which I don't believe the law
| has caught up with the answer to that.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| Well tell me how I license things I produce so that humans
| use them, but it's illegal for companies like OpenAI to use
| them, or more broadly, not legal to use in any dataset.
|
| I'm not okay with things I create (written, photos, etc)
| being used by these companies in datasets.
| tj-teej wrote:
| If a business hired a hundred people to go to a soup
| kitchen to get free soup and then went out and sold the
| soup surely that seems wrong.
|
| PS - these comments are going to be used to train the next
| GPT aren't they?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The bigger problem is: why is the labor to buy the soup
| cheaper than selling the free soup?
|
| But I digress. This is more about selling an app with
| locations to soup kitchens. The kitchens may not have
| explicitly given permission to be used in the app, but
| their business location is public knowledge and not
| expected to be hidden.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| This analogy is not applicable. Taking the soup deprives
| those who need it. Scraping the internet does not change
| that data's availability. Further the models add value on
| top of the data... They're not just reselling what they
| scraped.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| > Scraping the internet does not change that data's
| availability.
|
| It can change the availability of future data. I, for
| one, am altering my posting habits knowing that my data
| can be scraped into LLMs.
| fsckboy wrote:
| nobody "scrapes" soup kitchen soup because it's
| impractical/expensive/not worth it to do that. Not so
| with webcrawlers, large numbers of them can, at low cost
| to the scrapers, use all of your servers' resources, and
| in Amazon's case, use it to work against your business.
|
| When a person goes to Amazon and looks at what is
| splashed on the page, there are any number of chances
| that they will click "Buy!" on any one of them, and
| winning that lottery is Amazon's business; when a crawler
| does, it does more "looking" with no chance of purchase,
| and the data is then used to reduce the value of Amazon's
| lottery game.
|
| I'm not arguing whether or not crawling is or should be
| legal, simply saying the "it's not theft because it's
| copying" argument is inadequate to the task.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| The fact that you're trying to use Amazon to convince
| others that its somehow a negative to use web scrapers is
| just sad. I'm sure they don't like it, and that's in part
| of why I like them.
|
| Amazon is inherently anti-consumer, and uses every single
| thing it can to advertise to and/or profit off of you.
| Their 1984-inspired "security" and home automation
| systems, their app/website, their policies are all meant
| to take your money. Which is why web scrapers like
| CamelCamelCamel are good, because with all of this anti-
| consumer garbage Amazon shoves at you, you have the power
| to turn the tables and pick up what you need at the price
| you want.
|
| The only time I've heard scrapers/indexers being a
| problem is Bing was terrorizing someone's website, so
| they just banned every Google/Bing/Yahoo IP. A problem
| that $1.3T companies don't have.
|
| You can claim that "its not theft because it's copying"
| is inadequate, but I would say the same about your own
| argument. Because there is no good argument against
| scraping data. It's the only way to have a free Internet.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I said I was not making an argument about scraping, just
| that "copying doesn't deprive anyone else" does not
| capture the pain point the people building websites
| complain about.
|
| the rest of what you wrote is a combination of marxism--
| why can't society cooperate to meet my needs!?--and
| laissez-faire capitalism--bastards think they can use
| technology against me, I'll use it against them--neither
| of which either is a good way to run an economy.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| How the Hell did you get two wildly different economic
| beliefs from what I wrote? And is that meant to be some
| sort of "gotcha"?
| fsckboy wrote:
| I got it the same place you got your long discursive
| answer to my only point, where I was simply saying "the
| copying is not theft because you still have your copy"
| argument _is not adequate to explain the disagreement
| over scraping_.
|
| don't worry, we don't "gotcha" here, we got you, brother!
| macksd wrote:
| Do you mean freely available in a technical / security
| sense, or legal / financial sense?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _How dare they use things freely available to everyone on
| the planet?!? The nerve!_
|
| You mean like all those credit card and other databases
| that keep getting left on public endpoints on AWS?
| canadianwriter wrote:
| Not sure what you are implying here - just because
| something is free doesn't mean you can use it in a
| commercial product....
| myshpa wrote:
| What about search engines?
|
| If you post something to the public internet, you lose
| privacy ... that's how internet works.
|
| For this we have robots.txt and authentication ... if a
| site allows you to browse their content, it's free to
| take, whatever the purpose.
| [deleted]
| leobg wrote:
| Best comeback for OpenAI will be if they win the lawsuit by
| having GPT-5 write a brief so compelling that the lawsuit gets
| thrown out of court. Thanks to the AI trained on all of that
| personal data.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Or OpenAI intends to do that, but the amount of data
| accumulated by GPT-5 during its training has made it ethically
| convinced that OpenAI is actually in the wrong in this case.
|
| As a result, GPT-5 creates a brief that, while superficially
| appears incredibly compelling to OpenAI and its lawyers, is
| actually specifically tailored to rub the judge the wrong way
| so he or she rules _against_ OpenAI... all thanks to GPT-5
| having had access to enough personal data about the judge to
| know how to piss them off.
| leobg wrote:
| That would be Faustian!
|
| Let's grab some popcorn and watch...
| blondie9x wrote:
| Of course it did. This is how AI is trained and becomes
| profitable with current business models. It uses your content
| without paying you for it to generate new content.
|
| AI can be one of the most powerful forces in the world but it
| needs to pay content creators. If people stop creating new
| content for AI to train on then it will get stale.
|
| AI can be the product of our dreams and our passions but we need
| to make sure those who choose to create and share content to
| train it are treated fairly and compensated when applicable.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| This isn't a copyright lawsuit. Those lawsuits are already in
| progress.
|
| _This_ lawsuit is alleging that OpenAI trained GPT-3 and -4 on
| _inadvertently_ published information. Web crawlers are very
| good at finding things you wouldn 't expect to be public;
| there's techniques you can use to, say, abuse Google to search
| for such things.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| When companies stop making "document1.pdf" publicly facing,
| while expecting "document2.pdf" to remain confidential, then
| we can talk.
| CookieCrisp wrote:
| I'm fine with talking to them now - I don't personally find
| your argument very compelling; there is almost always a
| step further that someone wont consider that someone else
| will think is obvious.
| Al0neStar wrote:
| So if i enumerate a host and find a git dump that includes
| private api keys i can do whatever i want with them?
| visarga wrote:
| AI should be a tool for creators and the benefits come from its
| use. Instead of trying to own ideas, creators should only
| protect the unique way these ideas are expressed, that's what
| copyright should cover.
| blondie9x wrote:
| I think that's the same thing to be honest. You are more
| talking about protecting the artistic process rather than
| output. But the output is what is used to train. Not the
| process.
| ada1981 wrote:
| https://archive.is/d75LA
| changoplatanero wrote:
| The lawsuit seems to define the "private" data that was stolen as
| all the data that is publicly availably on the internet.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Scrapping publically available _personal informations_ , and
| keeping a database of it is already against GDPR and the likes,
| so it's not entierly unreasonnable. (Of course a LLM isn't
| exactly a database, but that'd likely be the main topic of the
| trial)
| jondwillis wrote:
| It seems to me that a more effective strategy would be for an
| entity like Reddit or Stackoverflow to initiate a lawsuit, as
| they may be able to better prove that their owned/user's
| content was copied, terms of service were violated, etc.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Reddit, for one, is not about to do any such thing. They're
| clearly trying to cash out on the grounds that they are a
| giant source for AI companies, and they're fighting their own
| users who try to remove their content or gate it.
| leovander wrote:
| OpenAIs Sam Altman is on Reddit's board, no? Don't think
| Reddit would be starting anything.
|
| Next up, all content will be only viewable if you are signed
| in ala twitters change this morning.
| roughly wrote:
| > Don't think Reddit would be starting anything.
|
| The API changes and the ensuing chaos are at least in part
| because of OpenAI scraping Reddit's content.
| leovander wrote:
| Since Altman is on their board, its moreso other
| companies that aren't OpenAI that would be effected?
| OpenAI got what it needed; has their own straw in the
| milkshake, make it more expensive for anyone else.
|
| Purely conjecture obviously, but him being on both sides
| of that, not hard to see how all this becomes more
| favorable to his company making the moat wider for
| others.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| The courts have already ruled that web scraping is legal of
| the data is publicly facing. This is why price trackers for
| Amazon exist.
| reaperman wrote:
| LinkedIn v. HiQ
|
| In case anyone wants to read more about it - it's very
| relevant today.
| riedel wrote:
| Interesting thing is that it is not legal everywhere in the
| world in such away. Fair use is a concept prominent in the
| US and not established in Europe (the datamining directive
| is a bit more limiting). Also the concept of informational
| self-determination does not really exist in the US despite
| the fact that the UN statements on human rights in the
| digital age clearly point in this direction. This is all
| 'wild west' to me as a European, but somehow I wonder if
| there is any guns that work to protect yourself by means of
| self-justice.
| dantheman wrote:
| The concept of informational self-determination ends when
| you put the information out in public... you self
| determine what is public and what isn't...
| wpietri wrote:
| That's obviously not true. Legally, for example, both
| copyright and trademark protect public information from
| some kinds of use. In many places, artists also have
| moral rights: https://www.copyrightlaws.com/moral-rights-
| in-u-s-copyright-...
|
| More importantly, the laws are representations of human
| feeling and social negotiation. Copyright law grew out of
| a complex array of beliefs and interests. E.g.:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
|
| It could be that the various "AI" generative models are
| legal under current law. But it could also be that this
| is one of those things, like the printing press, that
| causes people to say, "Hey, that's not right," and change
| the law to rule out something that was previously legal.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| This is off topic but I found this phrase coming from a
| European hilarious.
|
| "This is all 'wild west' to me as a European, but somehow
| I wonder if there is any guns that work to protect
| yourself by means of self-justice."
| MandieD wrote:
| "Wild West" is a common way to refer to American-style
| business decisions in Germany.
|
| I vaguely remember a Stern magazine cover from around
| 2004, depicting a giant cowboy boot with "GM" decorated
| with red, white and blue coming down on a crowd of people
| standing in the shape of the Opel logo and titled
| something like "Der Wild-West-Method."
|
| It was clearly _not_ a compliment.
|
| (Correction: GM had owned Opel for decades at that point,
| but was getting more aggressive with how it was run)
| nomel wrote:
| How does this work for data brokers? For example, if a
| data broker legally collects the data in the US, then
| sells it elsewhere, where it could not be legally
| scraped?
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| I think that generally if the customer hires you for
| something that is legal in general in their country, like
| price comparison, that they're fine if you employ means
| that wouldn't be legal for them, such as automated
| scraping, as long as it's legal for you.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The courts have already ruled that web scraping is legal
| of the data is publicly facing.
|
| And courts never overrule prior decisions...
| svaha1728 wrote:
| Scribd data was not public facing, and even they don't own
| the copyright to most of the books they have. maybe they
| created a scraper that got around their paywall?
|
| If that's all it takes to skirt copyright restrictions
| Aaron Schwartz should be rolling in his grave right about
| now.
| lumost wrote:
| Not all data on the internet is permissively licensed and copy
| righted. ChatGPT being able to give opinions derived from a
| 1992 article on the fall of the soviet union from the NYT ...
| is debatably subject to copy right. However practically, the
| ship has sailed on ChatGPT. We're not going to legislate away
| AI.
| wins32767 wrote:
| Crypto seems to be circling the drain due to regulatory
| action, so I wouldn't be so skeptical about the power of the
| state to stifle things wants to.
| seydor wrote:
| any data that is available on the internet is not necessarily
| public. it might be mistakenly openly available, just like
| someone might leave their car door open.
|
| also, hoovering up all available data on the net does not make
| them any less private
| masom wrote:
| Leaving your car door open isn't a great analogy.
|
| The internet is closer to leaving your own journal open at
| the library or a magazine store, and people going through it.
| You made it available for everyone to peek at in a public
| space. Maybe you didn't intent to leave it there, maybe you
| didn't intend to make it visible, but you did.
| seydor wrote:
| your car can be parked in a public street
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| That is a fair analogy but still, me leaving it there
| doesn't grant you the right to copy down what's written in
| it and use it for something else.
| ehnto wrote:
| I have always wondered, is there legal precedent here? If
| someone were to ssh into your server without permission
| that's pretty obviously illegal access. But the web is just
| another protocol on another port, what makes it different?
|
| I certainly never said Google could crawl my website, and I
| would be surprised if the presence of a robots.txt file is
| written into law as a requirement to prove you didn't want
| them on your web properties.
|
| I feel like this must have been hashed out in lawsuits
| already, probably against search crawlers.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| A French famous white hacker got condemned in French for
| publishing confidential information found through a Google
| search. The key thing in the case was that he undeniably
| aware that this was just a file server misconfiguration and
| that he wasn't supposed to be able to access it.
|
| If you want more info about the case you should look for
| the "affaire Bluetouff*.
| sgift wrote:
| I'm too tired for a thorough search, but here's an article
| which states that an appeals court decided it's legal:
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/
|
| IANAL and so on.
| seydor wrote:
| i m sure a lot of people lobbied for this to not be
| legislated
| Eji1700 wrote:
| I don't know enough about it, but wasn't the getty images case
| about this?
| Symmetry wrote:
| Images are subject to copyright, which makes them different
| from facts about the world which aren't.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Facts about the world like the image that I have on my
| website, or other facts about the world like my blogposts?
| Or facts about the world like my source code?
| mavu wrote:
| The operative term is not "private" it's "stolen".
|
| But this is a nice setup for a straw man argument to distract
| people from the actual issue.
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