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Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

One of my friends recently spent some time getting an OpenClaw instance running in Ubuntu so he could have a truly private conversation with it, complete with an air gap.

The value of that configuration has just been greatly magnified.

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Has it? There's value in privacy vis-a-vis snooping corporations, but those conversations could still be surrendered to the court if the judge rules them potentially relevant, and if your friend refuses to do so, he'd be held in contempt of court.

The judge would have to know about them.

Perhaps this could be gleaned from your ISP's records, but it would be far more difficult than determining the existence of an account at Anthropic.

I agree, but it's not like Anthropic was running to tell the lawyers and the judge in this story. The most likely scenario is your friend would just let slip he's using AI, or people who know him would let it slip, and the lawyers or judge will demand the conversations for discovery.

If I was strongly motivated to gather AI analysis of litigation, I think that I would turn to Tor if possible, and remove any specifics from the discussion.

If you think that’s going to hide you, think again.

What if the AI is configured to only do ephemeral conversations? Nothing stored.

What if there's no typed or visible text, and the entire chat is done via audio?

Unless you personally developed the AI to do this, then it is almost certain that any third party AI is harvesting every nugget from you in one way or another. Even when they say they aren't. Like all the other big tech out there, it was designed for the makers not for the users.

This thread is about a locally running LLM, with an air gap.

How can a third party company harvest anything from that? Even if you didn't develop the LLM yourself, if you downloaded it and are running it locally with no internet access, I don't see how it'll leak info to a third party.

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