Comment by jjcm 20 hours ago
Some do, some don't.
The reality is there are some of us who truly just don't care. The convenience outweighs the negative. Yesterday I told an agent, "here's my api key and my root password - do it for me". Privacy has long since been dead, but at least for myself opsec for personal work is too.
Paranoia is justified if it actually serves some purpose. Staying paralyzed and not doing anything because Someone Is Reading Your Data is not serving much of anything. Hint: those Someones have better things to do. LLM vendors really don't care about your bank statements, and if they were ever in a position to look, they'd prefer not to have them, as it just creates legal and reputational risks for them.
If you think people not using a tool released yesterday are staying paralyzed you must be either working for Anthropic or an enthusiastic follower, in both cases your opinion is not valid. None of this is something that is revolutionary and People have created trillion dollar companies without Claude Max
They somehow have to make big money, so it's just a matter of time until they will sell services to others, based on your personal data. And they probably have some clause in their contracts where you give them the right doing it.
> as it just creates legal and reputational risks for them.
Unfortunately I laughed reading this as there is never neither reputation nor legal consequences in the US of A. They can leak your entire life into my console including every account and every password you have and all PII of your entire family and literally nothing would happen… everything is stored somewhere and eventually will be used when “growth” is needed. some meaningless fines will be paid here and there but those bank statements will make their way to myriad of business that would drool to see them
The issue of consequences of data leaks, though real and something I find outrageous, is orthogonal to this discussion. When talking about sending personal or sensitive data to AI companies, people are not worrying about data leaks - they're worrying about AI company doing some kind of Something to it, and Somehow profit off selling their underpants.
(And yes, no one really says what that Something or Somehow may be, or how their underpants play into this.)
There obviously is reputation and legal consequences. You can get fined for billions for a far more indirect privacy violation that what you are describing. If any big company ever does that, I won't be touching it with a 10 foot pole. And no I don't believe using data for showing me ad is on the same level of privacy violation.
[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/...
fining facebook 5bn is like fining me $100. and reputation… please… we all know facebook what facebook is/does, they can release secretly recorded phone calls you are making and it’ll be news for like 17 minutes and people will then keep doomscrolling etc
I am genuinely confused by this comment, given the intensity of disregard/ignorance/bad-faith.
I mean we had these before in other very similar topics regarding e.g. Snowden leaks but really a lot of things. So.. uh..
The wording is just so on the nose I'm refusing to believe that this was written in good faith by a real person. Good engagement bait tho.
"Move fast and break things"
I could spend an extra 5 minutes doing it "right" or I can get what I need done and have a 0.001% chance of there ever being a problem (since there are other security measure in place, like firewalls, api key rotation, etc.)
Even when security gaps are exploited, the fallout tends to be minimal. Companies that had their entire database of very sensitive information leaked are still growing users and at worst paid a tiny fine.
> Companies that had their entire database of very sensitive information leaked are still growing users and at worst paid a tiny fine.
Or end up bankrupt with criminal charges for CEO: https://yle.fi/a/74-20027665
How many times do you have to roll the dice with .001% of disaster before it strikes? How often are you using the tool in this way?
> Privacy has long since been dead, but at least for myself opsec for personal work is too.
This is such an incredibly loser attitude and is why we can't have nice things.
I mean eventually, some adversarial entity will use this complete lack of defenses to hurt even the most privileged people in some way, so.
Unless of course they too turn to apathy and stop caring about being adversarial, but given the massive differences in quality of life between the west and the rest of the world, I'm not so sure about this.
That is of course a purely probabilistic thing and with that hard to grasp on an emotional level. It also might not happen during ones own lifetime, but that's where children would usually come in. Though, yeah, yeah, it's HN. I know I know.
> The reality is there are some of us who truly just don't care.
I would challenge that, with the same challenge I've heard about how Microsoft and Google reading your email. The challenge is "ok, so can you please log me in to your mailbox and let me read through it?"
It's not that people don't care, it's most that they've been led, or convinced, or manipulated, into failing to notice and realize this state of affairs.
Sometimes I wonder how we got here. Data breaches everywhere, my 64gb of ram i7 workstation slowing to a crawl when opening a file browser, online privacy getting increasingly more impossible. Then I read HN and it all makes sense.
Is there a place where you get things that are greater and more noble than apathetic indifference/go with the flow attitude?
The folks at the Qubes OS forum care about security, unlike the vast majority of HN users nowadays:
> The convenience outweighs the negative. Yesterday I told an agent, "here's my api key and my root password - do it for me".
Does the security team at your company know you're doing this?
Security as a whole is inconvenient. That doesn't mean we should ignore it.
> Privacy has long since been dead, but at least for myself opsec for personal work is too.
Hacker News in 2026.