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...
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.
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.
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.
Unless the competitor is in a country like China.
But how likely is 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.
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.