> What constitutional issues do you believe are present?
4th Amendment (Search and Seizure)
4th Amendment (Search and Seizure)
So I think that this is more so an artefact of the parameters than an outcome of some mechanism of law.
There is a reasonable expectation that deleted and anonymous chats would not be indefinitely retained.
> The court is just requiring OpenAI to maintain records it already maintains and segregate them.
Incorrect. The court is requiring OpenAI to maintain records it would have not maintained otherwise.
That is the crux of this entire thing.
Not quite. The court is requiring OpenAPI to maintain records longer than it would otherwise retain them. It's not making them maintain records that they never would have created in the first place (like if a customer of theirs has a zero-retention agreement in place).
Legal holds are a thing; you're not going to successfully argue against them on 4A grounds. This might seem like an overly broad legal hold, though, but I'm not sure if there are any rules that prevent that sort of thing.
Exactly
the government is not involved at all in this dispute, neither state or federal.
(for example, your own comment: the executive and judicial branches [of government])
Should I mention that water is wet every time I mention water? The executive is the executive, the judicial is the judicial. It's inherent in the discussion and pretending otherwise only for the benefit of furthering obtuse points that go nowhere serves the benefit of no one. So you either didn't know, and do now, or you're just cratering the discussion.
The distinction of the judiciary is most certainly relevant to the actual legal analysis here - the judiciary often reserves sweeping authoritarian powers for themselves, even when they do act to restrain the legislative/executive. So without even really analyzing the details, I am pretty sure that the law as written supports this action.
But the comment I was responding to wasn't making a larger more nuanced argument - rather it said that the government was not involved, defining away the actions of the judiciary as somehow not being governmental action, regardless of them being done with the authority of government.
The overall analysis is that if people are up in arms about this, it just reinforces the need for some actual privacy laws in this country - both to protect from corporations themselves abusing our data, and in this case to prevent the government from creating overly broad judicial orders that may only target specific companies but end up running roughshod over many individuals' rights.
(and just to be clear to avoid going off into the terminology weeds again: the definition of rights I'm using is the one of imagined natural rights, not merely what has been codified into law)
The commenter I responded to is an attorney who presumably just tried to cut out having to detail a longer argument based on the actual nuances that have been interpreted from the 4th amendment. Still, the argument bit off too much so in the interest of deeper analysis and rational discussion it seemed worth calling out.
> government order
They aren't called "government orders" they are called "court orders".
Give me a break with this nonsense alreayd.
This is Hacker News - we readily jump between levels of abstraction. I've acknowledged that the executive and judicial are separate branches are government, but my argument zooms out a level and treats them as both part of the larger government. Because when people feel their right to privacy is being violated by the government, it doesn't really depend on which branch is causing it!
It seems to me you want to hold to the distinction between the two so perhaps you can paint the action under discussion as if it's the result of something that could not just be changed? But obviously this capability of the judiciary could be restrained by Congress, the same as actions by the executive.
> but my argument zooms out a level and treats them as both part of the larger government
Okay? I'm not going to argue against your obtuse misunderstanding or recharacterization of the problem. No one was referring to the government that way, so pretending like they were "for the sake of argument" furthers nothing.
Discovery is not a search. There's no point to having this discussion when you keep pushing these obtuse misunderstandings of words that have particular meanings in these contexts. No less so when you insist you do understand that you are pushing different meanings of the words than what are being discussed.
> We're right back to where we started, with you wanting to rule out people's legitimate concerns by defining terms narrowly and then asserting the concerns make no sense under your definitions.
It's not a legitimate concern. It is a misunderstanding based on ignorance. So funny how we got here again. Looking forward to your next post where you tell me actually you did understand, you were just trying to make a completely different point.
> Sorry, communication does not work that way
The law does. You don't go to court and call that a search. It's discovery. Search you need a warrant for because it's something the gov't does. The gov't here being the *executive branch* when it prosecutes crime.
The legal system does not have a monopoly on defining words or being a source of truth. And it is obvious that the legal system's reasoning lines up with the action in this case - otherwise the action wouldn't have happened! If you were merely clumsily making a point about positive behavior (vs normative behavior), that might be understandable. But then we get:
> It's not a legitimate concern
You are trying to define away discussion about normative behavior by insisting on the legal system's definitions, as if the legal system's definitions and laws cannot be changed. Either because you think it's an easy way to win the argument, or because the legal definitions have warped your brain so badly that you cannot think outside of that box. Either way, sorry - there are valid concerns here.
Putting the way I see it in legal terminology: the relationship between a user and a data storage provider should be much closer to that of a trustor/trustee than the current "anything goes" regime. Legally demanding a user's data, and especially the retention of a user's data, from/by a centralized service should require some indication that the specific user is doing something illegal themselves - not merely that the hosting provider in aggregate might be. They are not "business records", but rather personal records being entrusted to the custody of a business.
Specifically in this case, it should mean that in order to access saved chats and demand retention of deleted chats, the NYT (et al) should have to point to specific users they think may be infringing upon their copyrights, not merely launching a fishing expedition against all users.
And once again, since you seem to have a problem keeping this separate - I'm obviously talking about how things ought to be, not how the current laws shake out.
It doesn't. But if you are going to discuss it, you should be discussing the actual thing, not the other thing which is irrelevant. It's no different than in programming. If were discussing programming arrays and you kept butting into the conversation about how arrays can mean other things in english, it would behoove no one.
>You are trying to define away discussion about normative behavior by insisting on the legal system's definitions, as if the legal system's definitions and laws cannot be changed. Either because you think it's an easy way to win the argument, or because the legal definitions have warped your brain so badly that you cannot think outside of that box. Either way, sorry - there are valid concerns here.
I'm not defining anything away. I did not come up with the legal definition for search in the context of the 4th amendment. That's on over 100 years of jurisprudence, not me.
> Putting the way I see it in legal terminology:
Of no use to anyone at all. If we're describing programming, mathematics, any science... it's not relevant what my own definitions, or the other definitions not applicable to the context.
>And once again, since you seem to have a problem keeping this separate - I'm obviously talking about how things ought to be, not how the current laws shake out.
So? A search is still a search in legal terms if we are discussing what the 4th amendment protects. You can either join the discussion we were having, or not. It's your choice. I'm not stopping you from doing anything, all I did was point out that your contribution was so far off from being cognizable in this context that it is doing everyone a disservice. You're clearly intelligent and capable of talking about these things accurately, you just chose not to.