Tell HN: OpenAI keeps re-enabling the 'allow training' setting
374
jjacquesm about 4 hours ago 145 comments
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I've reset this more than once and the last time I made a careful note of when I did it and to my surprise I found it re-enabled when I checked just now. Make sure you check this thing to see if it hasn't been re-enabled if you believe it to be off right now.
Discussion (145 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I resubscribed to Claude Code two weeks ago for a side project and updated it. I checked for the setting after these last events and it was turned on. I'm sure I checked them few months ago. There are cases like accepting a new TOS or an offer, which make you accept to share without noticing. I guess they can add all of your past conversations to the public training set before you notice and there is no way of taking this back.
So that "opt-out" thing is more like a pause button rather than a permanent thing. Or something to legally protect the company without losing the users.
There is also the case of security classifiers always monitoring your conversations. If they flag something they use your conversations to "improve their internal models" even when you "opt-out".
What's next, subscribers believe they are paying customers instead of sponsored data providers?
It's unfortunate that most societies have outlawed this practice. I'm certain if that were in place today, we wouldn't have this problem.
I've yet to hear any alternative solution that's as effective.
I have now witnessed this myself after not believing this at first. Of course, screenshots etc. will hardly prove anything. This needs a proper third-party audit!
This is apparently enough to hold up the broadly-accepted fiction that its possible to use these services while maintaining privacy and without risk. There's a huge industry of hosting services to handle the needs companies who compete with the primary cloud providers, who can't afford the IP and competitive risk.
OpenAI was caught directly stealing from apple, asking employees to bring in their laptops. Its a polite fiction that companies aren't trying to gain any advantage over the other. There's no effective consequence, and even if they get caught red handed they can litigate for decades.
I'm not sure why the second one is worse than the first one.
These companies need to burn.
> Allow your content to be used to train our models, which makes ChatGPT better for you and everyone who uses it. We take steps to protect your privacy. Learn more
Edit: I have a pro subscription now but it has also been on a free tier level for perhaps 1.5 of these years.
At best they’ll “anonymize” the data before adding it to the corpus.
https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control
https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2097746417012166816
They are a deeply unethical company by any measure of observation.
Verify with devtools to see if that's the case.
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for me, Youtube "auto-play" irks the me same way, and turning it off did not actually succeed in the backend, thus kept on left as on
(That copy is a little flawed in my opinion, I'd prefer "models" plural.)
That checkbox is in the ChatGPT settings, does it affect Codex desktop / Codex CLI as well?
https://privacy.openai.com/policies/en/?modal=take-control
presumably its default behavior will vary depending on your user subscription or if your account belongs to an organization (Business, Enterprise, Edu?).
What's kind of still an open question for me is if the toggle automatically also applies to my Codex CLI use on the same account, or if that data is still silently being used in some way.
After this happened, I deleted all my ChatGPT history (even though I'm not sure how much it helps at this point), but for Codex I still haven't really found any way to do the same, I can still load my past sessions even after archiving them.
If this is true, though, then given the way their chat operates, this might be more dangerous than it seems.
One of the things I like about ChatGPT is its memory, the way it kind of seamlessly, but not excessively, ties back to earlier discussions. It's huge for usability (for me).
But this also means that you should expect that if "improve the model for everyone" becomes unclicked (leaving aside for a moment the fact that that is ridiculous) then they have a reasonable argument that your decision implies to all conversations. Because recall is part of their thing. So it's not just your chats going forward that are at risk. As soon as you see that unclicked, it's reasonable to expect that your history is irretrievably theirs now. You don't even have to think they are especially nefarious for this to be true.
Don't go toggling that switch on and off.
So it may or may not happen regularly, but I would not over-index on a sample size of one.
It is a big red flag.
Or simply switch to a competitor. Assuming this is not just a bug, why would one stand for such disrespectful and sneaky behavior?
FWIW, I have not seen this happen for me.
the x20 Max plan for Claude gives you way lover limits.
lovers should never be limited!
If you don't want them slurping your data, you're gonna have to pay more.
Same as it ever was.
This approach of misnaming a company to try make a point is childish and, frankly, perplexing to me.
> They are even worst
Learn to write proper English.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://privacy.openai.com/policies
https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison?from...
Horrible.
https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/31987
Not sure if that's region specific or something though.
Now, obviously, considered as a whole, I think we're looking at "both". But when I wonder about specific cases like this one, that doesn't help.
I actually found my setting was enabled today when I know it was disabled before, so I’m inclined to agree with OP. I just think it was worth mentioning that there are other cynical takes you seem to have left out.
- Autoplay transitioned to a per-device setting… suddenly default-on on every new device you log in to.
- Watching a video with computer-to-TV account connection? Automatic “TV queue,” a concept absent from the TV app, with incomprehensible behavior for how it’s used, so now videos are auto-played anyway.
- Watching a video from a playlist? Autoplay cannot be turned off.
Is it simply bad/absent product management and product design? Or is it actively user-hostile decisions meant to prop up view numbers and continue to have the users hooked on YouTube?
Either way, is this a company you want to trust with intimate secrets? "Oh, but they passed SOC2!" Lol.
Adds the highest level of account security by requiring stronger sign-in methods and applying stricter protections to help prevent unauthorized access.
That is not about model training.
I went ahead and uninstalled the app. Won't be renewing.
maybe im too dumb to be worthy of a config update lol
Sure send them all your financial, personal data, they won't ever sell it on to the highest bidder for a new profit stream.
Using it as a therapist, financial advisor, health expert and blackboard has always been a terrible idea.
Ironically he proved two major findings in Navier Strokes and that unethical American companies violate laws, steal your breakthrough findings & IP and then threaten you if you dare to challenge them.
This is making the status-quo so bad for any of us working on serious capacity. My client's don't trust ChatGPT/Claude anymore and prefer on-premises and OSS models or even custom trained models.
Did the researches opt out from data sharing on subsidised subs?
Did anyone prove that their methods enabled OpenAI models to produce the solution?
For a discussion about science, there is almost no scientifical method applied to proving anyone stole anything.
On the other side, the lack of evidence is pretty damning. Only OpenAI can try to prove that they came by these results legitimately, and the case they're making is quite weak. They could make public metadata about what their model was trained on and whether it did train on the conversations in question; they have not. TBQH I read it as even they don't know.
And regardless of whether the result is legitimately obtained by their model, they've not at all conducted themselves well throughout this story. They set out to scoop researchers based on a rumor. They threatened to ruin a mathematicians career. They put up a paper that deliberately doesn't cite the most relevant research, despite building directly on it. No matter how you look at it, OpenAI has and should lose any standing they had in the research community.
1. https://thenextweb.com/news/bubeck-navier-stokes-account-apo...
If it's not the former, while certainly concerning, I don't see how that's relevant here (other than maybe in a very vague general sense of "entities doing immoral/illegal thing X are likely to also do immoral/illegal thing Y").
I want to discuss actual facts, observations and not your shallow social signaling replies of 0 value.
Same holds for most big corps from what I can tell. If you really do a deep dive into the scandals over the years, you’ll probably see most have barely reached the news or if they did then it’s usually a quite bland criticism like “anti-competitive practices” or a poor HVAC at a certain factory. I think a lot more is hidden than we think
Worse, they use the product and still don't know.
- OpenAI is the first AI lab to pioneer ads in consumer AI
- Anthropic seemingly exists primarily because top OpenAI researchers lost faith in the company's commitment to AI safety
- They had the CEO drama in 2023, with evidence that suggests people in a position to know were doubtful of Sam Altman's honesty and motives
- They were tripping over themselves to kiss the ring after Anthropic got in a row with the Department of War over using AI for autonomous killing systems and surveillance of US citizens
- Altman's record (YC, Loopt, WorldCoin) and associates suggests he subscribes to the Paypal-Facebook "move fast, break things, find and exploit gray areas" school of company building
All of this suggests that OpenAI will optimize its own growth and power over consumer welfare or societal stability in the future (obviously, companies aren't a monolith and I'd love to be wrong).
First one: "Settings > Data Controls > Improve the model for everyone > Switch off the toggle"
The other one is "OpenAI Privacy Portal" > "Do not train on my content" https://privacy.openai.com/policies?action=AUTOMATED_DECISIO...
Why are there several? You probably need an ML PhD to get it /s
Does using all of them achieve "do not train on my data"? I wish we could find out.
Do you think if you'd be in the race to train your own pocket God (as the CEOs of the frontier labs think they are) you'd let yourself be slowed down by such things as privacy duties?
There are a couple of reasons the privacy portal page exists in addition to the app settings. One reason is that it covers OpenAI products beyond ChatGPT/Codex (e.g., Sora). A second reason is that it provides functionality to logged out / non-users, like the EU right to be forgotten.
You don't need to toggle all of them to have your wishes respected. That would be a terrible design.
I work at OpenAI, but not on privacy. I am not their spokesperson. In my experience, we take a great deal of painstaking care to respect people's privacy, and we go well beyond our minimal legal obligations in doing so.