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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

If you draft an email threatening someone and delete it without sending have you committed a felony because someone at Google could be reading your drafts box, stored in a datacenter across state lines?

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Sounds reasonable. Google's bots could pick that up easily and forward if for human review.

FYI, the use of drafts folders to transmit messages has been used by terrorists. This is likely where CIA director David Petraeus got the idea when he needed a secure way to chat with his mistress.

https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/technologist/gen-petraeus...

Ah, a simpler and more innocent time of government scandals. I miss it. Now the messages are on White House stationery and they declare themselves above the law.

Be happy for where we are in 10 years we'll living in a world of llm based decisions where all conversations, actions, thoughts will be monitored. Where llms can excuse any decision. At least we have an all show government with at best partial results who generally retreats.

It sounds extremely unreasonable to me for "bots could pick it up" to transmute a private note into a felony threat.

It "sounds reasonable" that the exact same action could be a crime or not, depending on how an engineer implemented a feature?

How about you save a text file on your Desktop or in your Documents folder, which your computer has bullied you into syncing to OneDrive or iCloud. Fair game to get sent to jail for that?

Honestly, I'm equally fascinated by the way email has changed. 30 years ago when you drafted an email but didn't send it, it was only on your local machine. There was no SMTP. 20 years ago, it might be a 50/50 shot as to whether you "transmitted" it to your "Drafts" folder if you were using IMAP instead of POP3 to read it.

We really need a way to make it clear to users when, through the normal operation of software, they are "sending" data to a third party (usually the software developer) and when they are not. This is definitely not clear/knowable to regular users, and it's kind of hard to figure out even if you're a computer expert. Even software that "runs locally" now sends innumerable amounts of stuff back to the developer, and they don't always disclose it.

This is a huge privacy problem that is only going to get worse.

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