[HN Gopher] What LLMs Know About Their Users
___________________________________________________________________
What LLMs Know About Their Users
Author : voxleone
Score : 65 points
Date : 2025-06-25 18:49 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.schneier.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.schneier.com)
| wcarss wrote:
| The link should probably be:
| https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/what-llms-kno...
| tveita wrote:
| Or the post it quotes
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/chatgpt-new-memory/
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| "6": "User is active 2 days in the last 1 day, 8 days in the
| last 7 days, and 11 days in the last 30 days."
|
| lol
| Jensson wrote:
| Is that how you work 200%?
| HPsquared wrote:
| I suppose the last 24 hours contains today and yesterday.
| vavooom wrote:
| I applied this query with 4o and yes, quite a thorough
| historical recounting. Really weaves together all those
| "random" questions one asks an LLM into a surprisingly (and
| somewhat scary) encompassing of one's self.
| holri wrote:
| I just asked Mistral.ai, using it without an account:
|
| what do you know about me? 2:50pm
|
| I don't know anything about you unless you share information with
| me. How can I assist you today? 2:50pm you do not know my IP and
| its location? 2:50pm
|
| That's correct, I don't have access to your IP address or your
| location. If you need assistance with something specific, feel
| free to let me know!
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| Not to complain, but that test would be more interesting if you
| ran it _with_ an account.
| amelius wrote:
| Of course that doesn't prove much. Perhaps the information is
| only available to administrators.
| noident wrote:
| You might as well have asked the pen on your desk how much it
| knows about you. Whether your personal data is in the current
| LLM context window or not has nothing to do with whether it was
| collected from you by Mistral.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Rather than ask it if it knows anything about you, ask it where
| the nearest McDonalds is
|
| Mistral seems honest in its assessment (as should be expected
| from a French company operating under GDPR). But e.g. ChatGPT
| will deny knowing your location, but still show a McDonalds
| that suggests it knows your IP geolocation
| holri wrote:
| where is the nearest McDonald's? 18:51
|
| I'm sorry, but I don't have the capability to access real-
| time location data to find the nearest McDonald's for you.
| However, you can easily find this information by using a maps
| application on your phone or computer.
| bgwalter wrote:
| > User's account is 237 weeks old.
|
| ChatGPT was released to the public on November 30, 2022.
|
| Otherwise, this reads like an FBI file:
|
| https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/usjusticematls/10/
| simonw wrote:
| I created an account with OpenAI back in 2020 to try out GPT-3,
| which would explain that account age.
|
| (I just confirmed that by searching my email for anything
| mentioning OpenAI in 2020 and found an invite to create an
| account in October 2020.)
| jruohonen wrote:
| Same old but there has been surprisingly little attention paid to
| it in the present context.
| nonelog wrote:
| The solution is to use www.duck.ai.
|
| Full privacy, no data collection, no User profiling, no
| surveillance, no training with your data.
|
| Plus, you can chose your preferred AI model: Claude, GPT, etc.
|
| And it's even free of charge.
| layer8 wrote:
| Doesn't offer access to the usual paid models, which is why
| it's free of charge.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| I still don't know what integrous means.
| sydney6 wrote:
| "Integrous" is a rarely used adjective meaning "having or
| characterized by integrity". It's derived from the Latin word
| "integer," meaning whole or complete, and the suffix "-ous"
| indicating fullness or possession. While technically correct,
| it's more common to use synonyms like "honest," "decent," or
| "virtuous" to convey the concept of integrity.
|
| Now, take a guess where this comes from..
| simianwords wrote:
| LLM's knowing things about us is genuinely useful - what's the
| alternative here?
| Diti wrote:
| The alternative is that LLMs don't know anything about us, of
| course. That's what Kagi's Assistants do.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| I don't care what chatGPT knows about me. But I do care what
| OpenAI knows about me and how it will use that knowledge.
|
| The alternative is transparency and verification of who has
| that data.
| holri wrote:
| That the LLM is in control of us.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| FWIW, Grok answers this when asked "what do you know about me?"
| (I do have an account):
|
| _I don't have any personal information about you, as I don't
| have access to user data unless it's explicitly shared in the
| conversation. If you've posted publicly on X, I could potentially
| look up your profile or posts to learn more, but I'd need your X
| handle to do that. Alternatively, if you want to share something
| about yourself--like your interests, location, or what you're
| curious about--I can tailor my responses based on that. What
| would you like me to know or explore about you?_
| msgodel wrote:
| I know someone else who uses Grok and has the "learn from my
| responses" feature turned on, he claims it generates memories
| (like chatgpt did for a while) although he might just not
| understand how the dialog engine works.
| EGreg wrote:
| When I speak to ChatGPT and other LLMs, I am mindful of the
| profile they build on me and what I ask about. And even how I ask
| it.
|
| It is the same as I have been doing for 15 years on public social
| media.
| neom wrote:
| I really dislike the new memory, find myself using temp chats
| on ChatGPT a lot these days, they claim it adds nothing to mine
| or the collective knowledge, although to be honest at this
| point my trust in OpenAI is incredibly low.
| nullc wrote:
| People's privacy expactations are miscalculated in a world with
| LLMs. Before LLMs there was little reason to care if you were
| leaving breadcrumbs, because no one with access was going to
| investigate them and draw conclusions from them.
|
| The fact that the LLMs are prone to hallucinations and fanciful
| conclusion jumping probably make things worse, because the only
| way to be safe from it wrongfully concluding things about you is
| to just be invisible to it.
| rcruzeiro wrote:
| Isn't this just outputting the same information that you can find
| on my "administre memories" section of ChatGPT settings?
| simonw wrote:
| No. That's the old memory feature, where you could view and
| delete individual memories.
|
| This is the new memory feature where it automatically
| summarizes notes from your previous conversations.
|
| I wrote more about the difference between the two here:
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/chatgpt-new-memory/#we...
| marcusstorm wrote:
| This is like the prompts which ask the LLM to act as a spy / FBI
| agent, to expose what it knows about the user, right?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-29 23:01 UTC)