NY Times is reading your ChatGPT logs - what??

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A May 2025 court order in the New York Times copyright suit compels OpenAI to keep every consumer-tier ChatGPT conversation—including those users already deleted—so the Times’s lawyers can search them for evidence, overriding the platform’s 30-day deletion policy and up-ending the expectation that private chats would truly disappear. Because many people put highly sensitive material into ChatGPT—medical questions, legal drafts, proprietary code—the retroactive preservation of those logs feels like a sweeping breach of trust, effectively turning millions of intimate, non-party conversations into potential legal fodder. Even if access is limited to vetted counsel under strict confidentiality, the precedent that one litigant can force indefinite retention of such personal data erodes user confidence in AI privacy promises and chills open experimentation online. Privacy advocates warn that once a dataset like this exists it can leak, be hacked, or be subpoenaed in future cases, converting what was meant to be ephemeral chatbot dabbling into a permanent record vulnerable to fishing expeditions.

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