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Comment by lokar | Hacker News Reader

But it is, it somehow only applies to LLMs. What about doc apps? Todo lists? Chat apps?

There are tons of hosted app services where you can write private expressions. Why are only LLMs subject to monitoring?

You're really stretching here for some reason I can't fathom, but yes - if you write a credible threat to shoot up your school on a crumpled up paper and someone finds it, they should report it. I'm not sure that complicating this with which kind of app it's written in is all that useful ...

There's a big, big difference between "finding by happenstance" and "automated monitoring and analysis of everything written with invisible alerting of authorities". It's a step towards a digital panopticon and there are more than a few objections people would have to living under a digital panopticon.

Uh, no, text you write in private should not be automatically turned over to the police.

Sure; but writing to an LLM is not "in private". That's the point of the original post.

The average consumer thinks it is.

The average consumer also believes in fairy tales. That doesn't mean they're correct.

But consumer perception matters. When a person engages with a product a social contract is formed. If it’s broken as the case here, I think it’s reasonable that they fight back. They have an expectation is privacy and it wasn’t upheld regardless of what the TOS says or how the tech works. This probably ends with a warning in new sessions like the McDonald’s hot coffee warning.

Note that I’m not arguing if it’s right or wrong idk on that front

I don’t see how writing something you clearly intend to be private can be a threat.

How many mass shooters left diaries, letters, memoirs containing threats? I don't see why you don't see.

Innocent until proven guilty. Every citizen has rights until there is reasonable suspicion, probable cause, etc that they are commiting a crime.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...

If you want to be secure in your papers, maybe don't type them into a giant data collecting machine.

The court is going to have a look at it.

How many of them drank water and/or respired oxygen?

The false positive rate of the test that you suggest is frankly atrocious.

Is this a point you're arguing seriously? If you find someone's plans to, for example, shoot up a school crumpled in a note on the ground that should be...ignored? Or what? I struggle to comprehend what you're actually arguing for here.

I think I pretty much agree with you that if someone finds evidence of danger to someone else's life then it is a fair expectation that they do something with that evidence. And despite that I still believe that is not a good enough reason to eliminate someone's right to privacy, and yet still that right doesn't mean that we should be able to demand privacy in all products. I think it is fairly clear that these big LLMs are not private products and we shouldn't expect them to be, but I'm still in support of offering private alternatives that people could use without having every input scrutinized.

I guess I just see a lot of "X, but with an LLM" getting different treatment than just X recently, and it's confusing.

I don't think that most (any?) of these other cloud services monitor for this stuff, or that government thinks they have an obligation to do so.

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