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Comment by silveraxe93 | Hacker News Reader

No it's not. It's literally a court order mandating them to collect this data.

- [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/openai-offers-20...

This article says nothing of the sort. The court order is to preserve existing logs they already have, not to disable logging, and hand all the logs over the plaintiffs. OpenAI's objections are mainly that 1/there are too many logs (so they're proposing a sample instead) and that 2/there's identifying data in the logs and so they are being "forced" to anonymize the logs at their expense (even though it's what they want as a condition of transferring the logs).

There is nothing in the article that mentions OpenAI being forced to create new logs they don't already have.

This response is misleading. Almost all computer services keep logs for a short period of time, so the court order to retain existing information is quite a bit more powerful than a layman would think. Because a huge amount of data is retained for a short period of time and then rapidly deleted in most web services I've worked on for the past 30 years.

This is true in services like Datadog, New Relic, and logging services like Splunk. But even privacy-focused services like Mullvad keep logs for 24 hours to monitor for abuse. So this concept that retaining logs is significantly weaker than not ordering the collection is really a bit of misdirection. I'm not sure whether it's intentional, but it's definitely misleading.

Well, don’t get yourself sued and you won’t have to perform discovery for the plaintiffs.

There is an important distinction that relates to a court’s ability to order a defendant to perform work to facilitate discovery. A court can order preservation of records, but they generally cannot order a defendant to create new ones. I was responding to your use of the word “collect,” which implies significantly more effort than merely not destroying logs (i.e. logging new information that they weren’t already).

It’s not misdirection or misleading; it lies in an understanding of the law. There’s plenty of case law out there on the subject if you’re interested.

Both are simply software changes. In one case, they're going to have to alter the software to not delete chats that users request to be deleted. In the other case, they'll alter the software to log new information. Neither of these are particularly difficult.

I understand, but the law still distinguishes between the two cases. In my experience, typically expunging is handled by a process separate from its creation (it depends on the logging framework, of course). And with the increasing trend of generated logs being ingested, processed, and stored by separate services, often disabling log deletion is a mere API call away.

This is an excellent article and source. Thank you.

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