You are completely mad if you are running any kind of valuable workload on Runpod community or Vast. Hosts are absolutely peeking inside the VM's (you can see it openly discussed in their Discords).
Who cares if someones spying on the process of fine tuning a model to help us pick strawberries? Even if they could somehow find a competitor to sell it to - the competitor wouldn't be interested because the risk of violating trade secret law is surely greater than whatever they can glean from our training run...
There is law for patents. Trade secrets exist outside the realm of enforcement.
These were the statutes cited in the Anthony Levandowski lawsuit 9yrs back, where Uber settled for a 0.34% equity stake in their company.
You have to take “reasonable” measures to protect trade secrets. Uploading them to a service without any confidentiality agreement or worse, where the provider officially has the right to use that data, defeats the definition of a reasonable measure.
Privacy should be a default. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing.
It’s also unlikely they know what’s in the VMs until after they look at it.
Just like you can find all of my 3D models online because not being able to make them private is the price for the free license of Onshape, and I'm happy to let you look at those models rather than pay whatever a commercial license would cost.
It's so integrated with the specific inputs of my product, and the outputs that it needs, that the model just has no value to anyone else.
If a competitor needed such a model, they need to train their own that matches the form of their inputs and outputs, which is just going to be different.
Unless the competitor is in a country like China.
But how likely is that?
Uploading the models to an unscrupulous hosting provider where there was only some boilerplate terms of services agreed to.. would not seem to be that.
Coca-Cola can't go dropping leaflets around with the recipe for Coca-Cola Classic and then claim the recipe is a trade secret.
IANAL. Talk to your own lawyer before you mishandle your data.
Larger entities have the resources, the inclination and the protective legal teams to act much differently than a resource tight n-tier platform operator
Large firms have a much harder time hiding that kind of behavior, and they have much more to lose.
Large firms require processes and controls around everything. If Amazon is peeking into corporate customers' data, then there have to be mechanisms designed to allow that, a whole bunch of people know, it's part of engineering designs, and a whistleblower is going to leak it to the press.
And then Amazon is going to lose all of its business customers once its privacy guarantees were shown to be intentionally circumvented.
It is simply not economically rational for a company like Amazon or OpenAI to look at the data of its corporate customers.
Regular consumers are a different story, because you need to respond to abuse, illegal activity, etc. So they don't have the same privacy guarantees.
But corporate customers, that stuff is watertight. No cloud provider is going to risk losing their entire business because they violated their privacy guarantees.
An awful lot of this sort of thing in the corporate world is based on pinky-promises and legal threats, more than on robust technical controls.
Every production system I have ever seen has at least one set of dev-accessible keys that has access to the production DB. Mature systems at least had audit logging around who retrieved those keys, less mature systems often didn't have any kind of internal access logs.
Is "Amazon the corporate entity" snooping on your data? Absolutely not. Is someone with Amazon internal access snooping on your data? You'll never know either way.
AWS has also strip mined open-source software, elasticsearch, redis, mongo, browser rendering tools, etc.
Same goes for selling prices. Published retail prices are not trade secrets.
According to this comment, they did have a mechanism and a process for that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929959
Yet it seems to have had negligible impact on their ability to obtain and retain customers.
Can you explain? I haven’t used Runpod and don’t have time to search through a Discord to figure out what someone is talking about.
In any system where large numbers of people are renting out their homelab equipment, It's to be expected that there is no consistent data privacy policy. I can't even imagine trying to enforce some sort of system that would guarantee privacy of workloads.
I've used them a bit to prototype stuff where the data didn't matter.
[0]: https://upcloud.com/
It's fine for comfyui workloads or simple LLM inference, but you lose both privacy and stability.
But it definitely does happen.
As an example, midjourney use to just publish ever generated image to their website.
If you are just doing inference things are public/open from the start, you dont have to worry much about the stuff you are talking about here.
Which is kind of genius, if you think about it. Users can't get away with generating smut, CSAM, or copyrighted material, because it goes straight to the public record.