The AI companies have clauses in their user agreements saying they can review content flagged as harmful. It’s not legally spying.
If you recall previous outrage about ChatGPT being used in cases of suicides or shootings, this is the result. Every time a crime was committed and the police found ChatGPT history about the crime, the media turned it into a frenzy. So the AI labs added safety filters to their consumer plans that detect threats of violence, escalate them to human review, and report to the police.
Spying is not the right analogy because the information was given to the police by a third party which had a EULA saying they would do this. A more analogous situation would be someone reading another person’s diary and then turning it into the police department. There might be some limitation in the law that makes the evidence inadmissible because it was not intended to be shared with anyone, but that’s a separate decision.
>Spying is not the right analogy because the information was given to the police by a third party which had a EULA saying they would do this. A more analogous situation would be someone reading another person’s diary and then turning it into the police department.
This is spying with extra steps couched in corporate speak.
Well, let's say that you have a regular customer at a bar.
They get friendly and loose-lipped with the bartender over the span of months. Eventually they let slip that they plan on killing their spouse for a life insurance payout. At first the bartender thinks they're joking, but it becomes evident that there's an actual plan being acted upon and someone's life is very likely in imminent danger.
Does the bartender have a responsibility to go to the police?
It's not 2005 anymore. If you think that there isn't any way for the people operating an online service to surface your activity on that service, or that there is but those people aren't doing so, there might not be anything left to convince you of it.
What you put into a text box online can be used against you. Period. You have to act accordingly.
What? Why on earth would you think I don’t understand that? What about my response says otherwise?
If you are a business and I am using your services, it is pretty damn unethical and wrong to vacuum up my data and hand it off. Yes I know they all do it, I’m not naive. But a lot of comparisons people are making are not analogous to straight up sending a message or saying something to someone directly. Companies thrive on opacity and convoluted EULA’s to spy on us without clearly saying they are. Please do not talk down to me just because I’m talking about how things should be, about what is right and wrong, rather than blindly going “well AkShOoAlY you signed the thing and you should know that everyone is always trying to screw you so just live accordingly.“ I’m not OK with that, that is not how I want to live my life even if I am forced to, and I am going to make it known that I take issue with it.
Corporate surveillance is a blight, it is literally harming our society. Every time you tell people essentially “deal with it” you are reinforcing the current situation. Expect better from companies and society as a whole. Demand better.
You are clearly a smart person and you want to have a discussion, so is this the argument you want to make? Effectively defending companies by telling people to just suffer their abuses or keep their heads down?
My recommendation would be to not use those services. That's not "deal with it", that's "negate their value proposition until they comply with your demands as a consumer".
But if you feel so moved to use the product or service, or must for some reason, well... don't mention that you're thinking about committing a crime.
Also, I'd say that this isn't quite as clear as vacuuming up people's data and handing it off. There's not much money in calling the police on your users. What there is, is reduced liability.
Preface: IANAL.
Let's say the user in the story told Claude (or whatever product of Anthropic's she was using) that she was thinking of attacking law enforcement, and actually carried out the attack. People are injured or killed. Facilities are damaged. She's either arrested or killed. Either way there's an investigation into what happened. Law enforcement looks at her digital footprint and sees that she had mentioned to Anthropic through Claude that she was thinking about committing the crime.
Since there's now loss involved - the health of the survivors, the lives of the dead, and the usability of the facility - there's now a search on how to recoup that loss monetarily. The lawyers file a suit alleging that Anthropic neglected their duty of care to their customers and the community, because supposedly Anthropic's worth hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of dollars and those bastards need to pay.
The typical legal shenaniganning by Anthropic's lawyers doesn't get the suit tossed and it goes to trial. Survivors talk about how their lives have been changed forever, and opposing counsel says it's because those damned tech bros with the data centers and the job-killing AI didn't report the threat to law enforcement. The jury, being made up of people from the general public (who are polling as antagonistic towards AI [0]), agrees. They award damages.
Other lawyers, having case law and a template for victory, smell blood in the water. They put out the "if you or a loved one" ads like they did for asbestos and tobacco companies, but for AI. Individual suits and class-actions are filed.
Now the company is facing potentially billions of dollars in judgments and investors are looking for the exit because, well, there's not any money in paying off legal judgments.
And that's before we take into account any regulations that get passed.
If you're Anthropic's corporate counsel, and you're faced with this possible scenario, you tell their C-suite that you will quite literally lunge over the table and throttle them if they don't implement a policy to inform law enforcement of possible threats found in chats.
Man I’m just not reading past “don’t use them.” That’s nonsense and you know it.
Good luck going through life without touching Google, Facebook, etc. You don’t even need to deliberately use them, they’re just everywhere. I have extensions and more trying to block their trackers every damn day. The amount of work I put into protecting my identity and data is insane and I know it’s still not enough. But here’s the relevant part and what I’m surprised I need to say: We can’t possibly expect the broader population to exert the same effort. It’s not reasonable to expect individuals to take on decades old near-trillion-dollar companies that are literally dictating legislation. Caveat emptor does in fact have limits. It’s not a fair fight at all.
Well, regardless of what the laws are regarding privacy, you can pretty much count on these companies informing police when they find direct evidence of criminal activity on their services for reasons I make apparent in the part you said you're not reading.
Depends on the country. In some places, there is no legal repercussions for not reporting this to the police; in some, it is an actual crime in itself.
> Does announcing a spying operation mean that it is no longer spying?
Well, kind of, yeah; the dictionary definition of spying requires secrecy and lack of consent.
> to secretly collect and report information about the activities of another country or organization[0]
The only real debate is whether or not having a clause tucked away in a EULA that few people read makes it a secret. If Anthropic had a big flashing red banner that said "FYI we automatically flag and review any conversations about illegal things!!" on the front page nobody would call it spying.
Eh. Both Superpowers knew that they were spying on each other all the time, and that was still considered to be spying. But feel free to replace the word "spying" with the phrase "clandestine largely-automated mass surveillance" if it makes you more comfortable.
> ...and lack of consent.
Given
* the fact that the contracts one is required to "agree" to in order to use most services are often novella-length or longer, and frequently include by reference other contracts of similar length
* that nearly all contracts like this have a clause where not only does the powerful party reserve the -very frequently-exercised- right to change the terms of the contract without any prior notice, but said party presumes that you automatically accept the rewritten contract and gives you no option to negotiate
I'd argue that the real situation on the ground -in the US, at least- is that "consumers" have consented to approximately zero of the contracts that -despite that lack of consent- legally bind them.
I would call it spying in this sense at a minimum if individual people don't know whether their conversations were stored or disclosed in a way they don't want. For example, suppose someone said "we will monitor the activities of 10% of people". You don't know if you're in that 10% or not, but I would still want to call that spying.
A less central case would be when you clearly do know about the activity but you can't quite see the details, like with behavioral ad targeting or something. It feels pretty normal to me to call that spying even if it's disclosed to everyone and certainly happens to everyone, but it's also a less central example of the concept.
Anthropic could put a big flashing warning text at the top of every chat that says “We are spying on you and will report anything scary to the police!” and it would not make any difference in this case.
You can call it anything you like, but only the legal definitions matter for the legal case.
After working on several court cases about surveillance activities, I'm definitely aware that whether I call something spying or not has little relationship to whether courts will think it's legal.
> If Anthropic had a big flashing red banner that said "FYI we automatically flag and review any conversations about illegal things!!" on the front page nobody would call it spying.
If you change the situation then yes you can in fact change our responses. The problem is you then are no longer talking about the original situation.
It also bears mentioning that providing a dictionary link to “spying” is pretty patronizing/passive aggressive. On par with sending a basic Wikipedia page. You didn’t even bother to post the definition you want to apply.
No one claimed any case would be "thrown out for spying." The legal definition of spying is also not particularly relevant to the argument in the initial comment.
The initial comment instead questioned how someone could be accused of making a threat if they did not realize anyone would read their private content. You probably also can not insult someone with a statement you never expected anyone but you will ever read.
> Presumably, Anthropic did the spying and the reporting.
You don’t need to presume. Anthropic reported it.
“Spying” as a legal concept has a definition that does not apply here. You could say they were “spying” in the sense that they read someone’s input, but that’s literally what they said they were going to do in the agreement when the person signed up.
So I responded to the question about the case being thrown out for “spying” by trying to show that the word doesn’t apply in the legal sense. If you sign up for a service that says “Hey we’re going to monitor your chats and might report things to the authorities” and then they monitor your chats and report things to the authorities, you should not expect the case to be thrown out for “spying”.
There is no spying by any definition. It's a chatbot, not a diary. Anthropic is expected to read the message and respond to it in some way. If you sent an email to a colleague threatening violence, you would not be surprised to find out it was reported.
"Anthropic" does not read messages, it's an abstract entity involving many humans and computers, so let's be specific wherever possible.
> and respond to it in some way.
The computer is supposed to respond in a specific way that doesn't involve humans. Any reading/actions by humans is entirely separate and not expected.
> If you sent an email to a colleague threatening violence, you would not be surprised to find out it was reported.
Yeah it’s like someone going through your email drafts. I keep seeing people using examples that are clearly not analogous. If I send something to a person or say it out loud knowingly to a person it changes the situation entirely. I am aware of others, I am aware I sent it to be received and read. That is clearly not what happened here.
I’m speaking from a functional/ethical framework to be clear. I’m just expressing frustration, not challenging the comment. Could’ve been clearer on my end there.
Not only that they can review flagged content, but they tend to have separate retention policies for flagged content. Anthropic's is this: "We retain inputs and outputs for up to 2 years and trust and safety classification scores for up to 7 years if your chat or session is flagged by our automated trust and safety systems as violating our Usage Policy."
So don't run for office or anything like that. Someone, somewhere will have a contact that will get that.
It kinda is, actually. If the LLM had responded with 'woah, are you serious? That sounds like a crime and I can't just ignore that, it's made clear to the customer that such statements are out of bounds even if they were meant hyperbolically or humorously. But if someone crosses the guardrails and the system silently reports them, that's very much spying.
Obviously, it's hard to judge exactly what was appropriate there because we're being asked to extrapolate from a two word quote about the customer intending to "shoot up" the sheriff's office. Consider the following two statements, which express quite different levels of intentionality.
I got a $200 ticket from a sheriff's deputy today for throwing away an apple core. I'm so mad. I'd like to shoot up their office!
Those sheriff's deputies have exhausted my last reservoir of patience. I'm going to shoot up the department. They'll be sorry when they're sprawled all over the floor bleeding out from saucer-sized shotgun slug wounds. I can't wait to hear the screaming and crying of their miserable families!!"
I'm guessing that the diary entry was a more casual expression similar to the first statement, or they police would have quoted more of the statement to emphasize the apparent severity of the risk but it's hard to say without reading the charging documents.
yeah why wouldn't the llm push back? I said "fuck you" to gemini once and it replied to watch my manners, and when I realized that it could delete my emails no problem I'm now all please and thank you, problem solved.
The AI companies have clauses in their user agreements saying they can review content flagged as harmful. It’s not legally spying.
If you recall previous outrage about ChatGPT being used in cases of suicides or shootings, this is the result. Every time a crime was committed and the police found ChatGPT history about the crime, the media turned it into a frenzy. So the AI labs added safety filters to their consumer plans that detect threats of violence, escalate them to human review, and report to the police.
Spying is not the right analogy because the information was given to the police by a third party which had a EULA saying they would do this. A more analogous situation would be someone reading another person’s diary and then turning it into the police department. There might be some limitation in the law that makes the evidence inadmissible because it was not intended to be shared with anyone, but that’s a separate decision.