November 10, 2025

"As people increasingly turn to A.I. chat tools as confidants, therapists and advisers, we urgently need a new form of legal protection that would safeguard most private communications..."

"...between people and A.I. chatbots. I call it 'A.I. interaction privilege.'... At present, most digital interactions fall under the Third-Party Doctrine, which holds that information voluntarily disclosed to other parties — or stored on a company’s servers — carries 'no legitimate expectation of privacy.' This doctrine allows government access to much online behavior (such as Google search histories) without a warrant.... To leave these conversations legally unprotected is to invite a regime where citizens must fear that their digital introspection could someday be used against them. Private thought — whether spoken to a lawyer, a therapist or a machine — must remain free from the fear of state intrusion."

Writes the historian Nils Gilman, in "If You Tell ChatGPT Your Secrets, Will They Be Kept Safe?" (NYT).

43 comments:

n.n said...

Automaton Intelligence. Nothing has changed.

Leland said...

It sounds like the typical progressive argument to claim to protect people by convincing the people to give the progressives the power to censor the people's behavior. It's for your own good and will protect pregnant people and children.

doctrev said...

If you're stupid enough to assume AI-client confidentiality with an evil corporation, ChatGPT may as well do your thinking for you.

PM said...

"If You're Stupid Enough to Tell ChatGPT Your Secrets, Will They Be Kept Safe?" TIFI.

David-2 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
David-2 said...

People delegating their thinking, such as it is, to large language models, which cannot reason. Mondami wins. Jasmine Crockett, AOC, Ketanji Jackson, etc. Starmer, Merz, Carney, etc. Brennan, Comey, Clapper, Strzok, Smith, etc. Men in women's bathrooms and locker rooms. Object Sexuality is a recognized thing. The more I think about it the more I support SMOD for 2028. If not 2026.

Beasts of England said...

Nothing is private in signals intelligence. Not this comment, not your search history, not anything you ask SIRI, not your text messages, not your cell phone calls. If it travels via the internet, cell tower, or satellite link, it’s scooped up. Period.

Bob from the NSA should have mentioned this.

Wilbur said...

No Alexa, no Siri, no nothing in my house.

Why anyone would is beyond me.

Beasts of England said...

’No Alexa, no Siri, no nothing in my house.’

Having a cell phone can monitor every word is bad enough. Alexa and Siri should be named Goebbels.

Beasts of England said...

’To leave these conversations legally unprotected is to invite a regime where citizens must fear that their digital introspection could someday be used against them.’

Let’s hope it remains ‘could’ and not ‘will’, but it’s a totalitarian’s wet dream. I think someone wrote a book about such a society.

Old and slow said...

Google search and web browsing histories should also be considered private and require a court order to access.

jim5301 said...

Privacy is so 20th century

Jim at said...

No Alexa, no Siri, no nothing in my house.

Why anyone would is beyond me.


We have Alexa with our Echo. It's unplugged when not in use.

Since buying it five or so years ago, I've deliberately baited 'her' into hearing only my voice and my suggestions. Like cars, whiskey, favorite musical artists ....

'She' refuses my wife's requests. Ignores her. If my wife requests a song? Nothing. Only responds when I make the request.

It's really enhanced our marriage. :)

Rabel said...

Gilman's solutions don't match up well with his concerns.

"If an A.I. service reasonably believes a user poses an immediate danger to self or others or has already caused harm, disclosure should be not just permitted, but obligated."

tommyesq said...

Private thoughts expressed to others is generally not protected from discovery, unless the other is a specific class of person - attorney, clergy, spouse, etc.

Shouting Thomas said...

To paraphrase Peter Diamandis: “Privacy is an obsolete concept.”

tommyesq said...

No Alexa, no Siri, no nothing in my house.

I agree, but that is likely not enough. I once had my Samsung television (which was turned off at the time) respond to a question I had asked someone on a phone call. Anything that permits voice commands is always listening.

FullMoon said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jupiter said...

Well. There is something to be said for the "If you've got nothing to hide ..." point of view. Logically, if someone kidnapped that good-looking neighbor of yours who sunbathes nude out there in her back yard, and locked her up in a little room in their garage, you'd want them caught. Right? So, if they used ChatXYZ to plan it, you'd want the cops to find that out. Right?
Right?

bobby said...

Artificial Inanity.

Aggie said...

Just shaking my head. If you're telling anybody your secrets, and you don't know them personally, intimately, with a long-standing relationship, and you're not doing it face-to-face in a place you are fairly certain is secure - then you have no way of establishing they are confidential and secure in the first place. But how, on Earth, could you ever trust an Artificial Intelligence through a computer interface, on the internet? Because it says so?

n.n said...

You should also avoid Google, Bing, and other AIs with a memory. Blogger, too. Stop spying on me, Andrea, Siriusly. No more credit. No more crypto with perfect attribution.

n.n said...

The dog has unvetted loyalty, and the cat knows where the fetuses are sequestered. The transgender fish knows what you did last summer.

Ambrose said...

If it moves, regulate it.

LakeLevel said...

Not to mention translation apps.

Joe Bar said...

At one point in my life, I was exposed to a lot of signals intelligence. There a lot of "WTH!" stuff out there.

Jupiter said...

Pondering the matter further, I think we would all like for the government to have very extensive investigatory powers, essentially all possible investigatory powers, to pursue all violations, of all laws, that we agree with. But we don't trust the legislature to only pass laws that we agree with. And we also don't trust the various enforcement agencies to faithfully apply the law.
Aye, there's the rub. From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

WK said...

Make the AIs mandatory reporters.

Jupiter said...

In that light, the apparently quite general agreement that this is about privacy seems to me to indicate, that everyone believes that the government is inquiring into things that are none of its business. There are enough fucked-up laws that everyone is violating a few. Or, at least, no one can be sure they aren't. How would you know?
There are millions of them.

Jupiter said...

At this point, we are all just relying on the hope that the government has better things to do than investigate our own particular circumstances, since we really have no idea what laws are out there, or what nonsense they might be tortured to say. When everything is illegal, as Lavrenti Beria put it, "Show me the man, I'll show you the crime".

Jupiter said...

Ironically, it turned out that Beria was himself, guilty of crimes, for which he was executed. Or something. Anyway, he was executed.

Jupiter said...

They got that part right.

Jupiter said...

Although, back in 2015 or 2016, I rented a room in Hillsboro from a guy who had grown up in the Soviet Union. His father had been a fairly senior military officer, and he had grown up in fairly privileged circumstances, for the USSR. Stationed in Germany for several years, with their own apartment, for instance.
When I made some offhand remark, which just took it for granted that Lavrenti Beria was a grotesque and appalling monster -- Beria sent his goons out into the night to bring pretty young girls to his office in the Lubyanka so he could rape them, and then send them flowers the next day -- he was appalled and astonished. First he was appalled and astonished that I would say such things about LB, Hero of the SU. But after spending some time with the internet, he was appalled and astonished in a different way.

Jupiter said...

Of course, if you spend a little time with the internet, you might believe that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz, that were used to kill humans. The internet will report any lie, and the Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg presented a great many of them.

Jupiter said...

I should point out, that by sending his victims flowers, Beria was letting his victims know that he retained a fond memory of their brief time together. And also, that he knew where they lived, with their families.

NMObjectivist said...

Your AI or LLM remembers everything you ever said. Forever.
Be advised.

Mr. Majestyk said...

"Of course, if you spend a little time with the internet, you might believe that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz, that were used to kill humans. The internet will report any lie, and the Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg presented a great many of them."

So the Holocaust didn't happen? What leads you to this conclusion?

LakeLevel said...

NMObjectavist: "Your AI or LLM remembers everything you ever said. Forever. Be advised."
Again, translation is totally compromised. 25 years ago translator programs were local to your computer. Why exactly can't you get better versions of translation programs today that are local to your computer when today we have much much more powerful processors and much bigger memory and much better machine learning models??? Have I said too much?

LakeLevel said...

I should have add "local to your computer or phone".

Jupiter said...

"So the Holocaust didn't happen? What leads you to this conclusion?"
Well. Obviously, events took place in Eurasia in the 1940's that were disastrous for millions of people, many of whom were Jewish. If that means there was a Holocaust, then there was a Holocaust. But no one was killed with Zyklon B, or any other "gas", in gas chambers in "concentration camps" in Germany, or in Poland, or anywhere else.
Start here.

Jupiter said...

BTW, the "Holocaust historians" have, by now, admitted that there were no "death camps" in Germany. Whatever you may have heard about American troops "liberating" death camps in Germany, that did not happen. And no historian claims it did. Instead, they now claim that the "death camps" were in occupied Poland. Except that all the camps in Poland turn out to have not been "death camps". The German administrators of camps like Auschwitz and Majdanek were deeply concerned about massive deaths from typhus, and they used Zyklon B to kill lice in the clothing of incoming prisoners. And that's all they used it for, and it would have been both ineffective and dangerous to prison personnel to try to use it to kill prisoners. The whole tale is an absurd myth made up after the war was over.

Jupiter said...

It has, fairly recently, been revealed that the Allies had broken the German Enigma code, and were reading huge amounts of what the Germans believed was secret communication. But none of those communications say anything about a "final solution". Instead, they reveal a prison system struggling desperately to contain a typhus epidemic in the face of an allied bombing campaign that has nearly eliminated rail transport.

Jupiter said...

Suppose I were to tell you, that whales can fly like birds, hundreds of feet in the air, just using their flukes. You would probably conclude that I was -- mistaken. But if you were to report me to the police, they would not be likely to take any action. It is not illegal to claim that whales can fly.
However, in most of the countries of Europe, the claims I have posted here in this comment thread are illegal, and hundreds of people are in prison, right now, for making such claims. Why do you suppose that is? Isn't it dangerous to claim that whales can fly? I guess not. But it is dangerous to claim that there were no German death camps. Which raises the question, "Dangerous to whom?".

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