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Tell HN: OpenAI keeps re-enabling the 'allow training' setting
I've reset this more than once and the last time I made a careful note of when I did it and to my surprise I found it re-enabled when I checked just now. Make sure you check this thing to see if it hasn't been re-enabled if you believe it to be off right now.
- jasonjmcghee 6d agoI've done the formal opt-out process - like "Make a privacy request" where you fill out a form. Not sure if that's region specific or something though.
- amelius 6d agoIf you document it properly then this basically destroys any legal claim they can make about that checkbox.
- vb-8448 6d agoOut of curiosity, how one is supposed to "document it properly"?
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- g-b-r 6d agoYou can obtain a cryptographic proof by recording the tls exchange, including the keys You need to use a tls intercepting proxy for that. I couldn't find any ready-made tool unfortunately, there's tlsnotary.org but it seems far from simple.
- vb-8448 6d agoSo basically I record what the browser sends to the server when I click the toggle and the server response? I wonder how I can attach a timestamp that cannot be faked.
- amelius 6d agoLook into court-grade eDiscovery Software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_discovery Specifically forensic web preservation or web capture tools. PS: If they made it impossible for you to prove that you clicked a checkbox or not, then, logically, the burden of proof is on THEM.
- g-b-r 6d agoThat Wikipedia article seems to have no bearing on the issue; there's not even any log on a normal user's computer of having or not having clicked a checkbox. > If they made it impossible for you to prove that you clicked a checkbox or not, then, logically, the burden of proof is on THEM Even in Europe the only "proof" that's required to companies is a log or database entry (both easily manipulated); if a user strongly disputed to have done it and sued the company for that, maybe you'd able to obtain some investigation on their systems.
- g-b-r 6d agoIf you have the TLS session with all the keys, that's signed with the server's key, so it's basically certified by them themselves. They could only claim that it's been faked by claiming that you stole their TLS private key.
- andsoitis 6d ago> Make sure you check this thing to see if it hasn't been re-enabled if you believe it to be off right now. Or simply switch to a competitor. Assuming this is not just a bug, why would one stand for such disrespectful and sneaky behavior? FWIW, I have not seen this happen for me.
- cute_boi 6d agoAnd don't switch to Misanthropic lol. They are even worst...
- dgellow 6d agoHas Anthropic been found re-enabling that checkbox? I cannot find anything on that topic
- andsoitis 6d ago[flagged]
- nullc 6d agoIt's a fitting name.
- DrammBA 6d ago> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- danillonunes 6d agoReminds me the days people would write Micro$oft (usually in Linux vs Windows discourse). It's funny to think that back in the days we used to think the most evil thing a company could do was charging money for their software. Today we even praise some companies because they are "less evil" and they actually charge money, instead of giving the service for free and mining our data (e.g. Fast Mail vs Gmail; or Kagi vs Google).
- jerf 6d agoMy cynicism fails me on this matter... do I cynically believe that these companies keep deliberately and routinely re- or un-checking these checkboxes because of the obvious benefits of "whoopsie guess you allowed these after all"? Or do I cynically believe that they are just so completely incompetent and inept at the simple act of maintaining settings that there may be a number of these that are not entirely intentional? As evidenced by the number of other bugs and configuration failures and random settings changes on update I see in other places? Sure, these sorts of settings sure seem to get spontaneously flipped more often than the other ones but they aren't the only settings I've seen get nuked on updates. Now, obviously, considered as a whole, I think we're looking at "both". But when I wonder about specific cases like this one, that doesn't help.
- pacificat0r 6d agoOh no… OpenAI, the company who encourages and instructs Apple employees on how to get them data on apple products when they accept an offer?
- philipov 6d ago"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"
- 27183 6d agoYeah this could just be some vibeslop doing normal computer stuff. AI agents are famously incompetent at reasoning about database transactions. This seems like the sort of failure you get when you try to do distributed systems without knowing how--brings us back to the early mongodb days. Or it could be deliberate. Or, as you say, both. Either way, is this a company you want to trust with intimate secrets? "Oh, but they passed SOC2!" Lol.
- yearolinuxdsktp 6d ago“Autoplay” and YouTube case in point: - Autoplay transitioned to a per-device setting… suddenly default-on on every new device you log in to. - Watching a video with computer-to-TV account connection? Automatic “TV queue,” a concept absent from the TV app, with incomprehensible behavior for how it’s used, so now videos are auto-played anyway. - Watching a video from a playlist? Autoplay cannot be turned off. Is it simply bad/absent product management and product design? Or is it actively user-hostile decisions meant to prop up view numbers and continue to have the users hooked on YouTube?
- antonok 6d agoI've noticed that toggle sets a local storage entry, but the value of it doesn't appear to matter at all for new tab loads. I hoped it's "just" a UI bug, but some agent-driven reverse engineering of the page should reveal the answer, as well as how intentional it was.
- sunaurus 6d agoBased on their behavior over the past few years, why would you assume that checkbox even does anything at all?
- ALLTaken 6d agoLevent Alpöge 'additionally' proved OpenAI steals your findings & IP and plays dirty! Ironically he proved two major findings in Navier Strokes and that unethical American companies violate laws, steal your breakthrough findings & IP and then threaten you if you dare to challenge them. This is making the status-quo so bad for any of us working on serious capacity. My client's don't trust ChatGPT/Claude anymore and prefer on-premises and OSS models or even custom trained models.
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- lxgr 6d agoDid they do so by looking at inference prompts against their explicit promises, or maybe just because somebody tipped them off about his unpublished work? If it's not the former, while certainly concerning, I don't see how that's relevant here (other than maybe in a very vague general sense of "entities doing immoral/illegal thing X are likely to also do immoral/illegal thing Y").
- innocent_name 6d agoI do trust Anthropic, i haven't observed them doing super shady stuff like hiding the training consent page and making you WAIT for it to activate.
- Insanity 6d agoYou really shouldn't trust any company. Their goal is maximizing profit and that is (usually) not aligned with "doing what's right". Not in the long-term at least.
- 6d ago
- frangonf 6d agoThere's also this setting here which I have set to 'Do not train on my content' even though I trust it the same as the 'allow training' one... https://privacy.openai.com/policies/en/?modal=take-control https://privacy.openai.com/policies/en/?modal=take-control
- jtolly710 6d agoThx for the link, hadn't seen this one, submitted also
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- arpinum 6d agoTurn on "Advanced Account Security", that prevents model training from being turned on.
- esafak 6d agoWhere does it say that? https://chatgpt.com/#settings/Security https://chatgpt.com/#settings/Security merely says Adds the highest level of account security by requiring stronger sign-in methods and applying stricter protections to help prevent unauthorized access. That is not about model training.
- noname120 6d agoIt prevents unauthorized access from OpenAI’s model training.
- arpinum 6d agoDocumentation is not complete, it also protects your data from being used in training.
- esafak 6d agoCitation?
- arpinum 6d agohttps://openai.com/index/advanced-account-security/ https://openai.com/index/advanced-account-security/ > Automatic training exclusion. People working with especially sensitive information may opt not to have those conversations used for model training. With Advanced Account Security enabled, that preference is automatic: conversations from those accounts will not be used to train our models.
- ActionHank 6d agoLol, "Outrageous that the company that chose to ignore copyright holder claims, chose to ignore my checkbox of intent despite the implied pinky promise".
- achrono 6d agoIgnoring the checkbox is an utterly offensive move, but repeatedly manipulating it contrary to stated consumer intent is a whole other level. I didn't know we were supposed to take 'frontier' literally in every sense of the word. I have now witnessed this myself after not believing this at first. Of course, screenshots etc. will hardly prove anything. This needs a proper third-party audit!
- xboxnolifes 6d agoOh they aren't a frontier on this. Undoing user configuration is well tested in Windows land.
- mcmcmc 6d agoThis is a problem everywhere, Apple does the same thing on MacOS by reverting privacy/security grants to apps
- threetonesun 6d agoReverting... to on? I've seen some stuff in Apple-land where I'm pretty sure it went back to the default option after an update but I've never seen anything get granted more permissions.
- mcmcmc 6d agoNo, like specific apps that have been granted full disk access etc lose their permissions. It’s hell for IT, constantly breaks AV. I would not characterize that as reverting to a default. More often it’s a breaking change for how the security model works that ends up requiring reauthorization
- cbg0 6d agoI've disabled the checkbox many months ago and it's still disabled today. EU citizen, not sure if that's relevant.
- henry2023 6d agoWhat makes you think the company that pirated a big portion of all copyrighted work will care about this checkbox? At best they’ll “anonymize” the data before adding it to the corpus.
- stingraycharles 6d agoFairly certain OP lives in The Netherlands.
- bossyTeacher 6d agoDid you look him up?
- stronglikedan 6d agoIt literally says so in their profile.
- stingraycharles 6d agoHe’s quite well known on HN.
- spongebobstoes 6d agosame, I'm a paying user in the US
- burntalmonds 6d agoSame here. US.
- layer8 6d agoSame here, I just happened to check yesterday and hadn’t checked for at least half a year.
- franzcoughka 6d agoi mean, the entire company is built upon stealing protected artefacts... i'd be skeptical of any radio box that says "hey if you press this we promise we won't steal your data"
- yipinwong 6d agoDoes OpenAI use optimistic UI updates? After you disabled the checkbox, it might have had failed in the backend (and not updated the UI). Verify with devtools to see if that's the case. --- for me, Youtube "auto-play" irks the me same way, and turning it off did not actually succeed in the backend, thus kept on left as on
- codeduck 6d agoif it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...
- throwatdem12311 6d agoIt won’t be an option soon enough. I doubt they even honour it now anyway.
- enraged_camel 6d agoCan confirm. I turned off mine last week when I started using it again for Astra. Checked this morning and voila, it was on. I went ahead and uninstalled the app. Won't be renewing.
- olalonde 6d agoWeird, I'm the opposite. I don't recall ever setting mine and I just checked and it was set to "disallow training".
- riffic 6d agoIs this Settings > Data Controls > "Improve the model for everyone" or is there a "disallow training" somewhere else? presumably its default behavior will vary depending on your user subscription or if your account belongs to an organization (Business, Enterprise, Edu?).
- olalonde 6d agoYes that's what I was referring to. I'm a non paid user but I did briefly pay for a consumer subscription before. Not sure what region I'm assigned to as I'm in China and always access through a VPN.
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- kd913 6d agoOdd how much data people are trusting with a company on a monetary cliff edge. Sure send them all your financial, personal data, they won't ever sell it on to the highest bidder for a new profit stream. Using it as a therapist, financial advisor, health expert and blackboard has always been a terrible idea.
- snihalani 6d agoreminder to consider using an open weights model
- the_duke 6d agoI disabled it once, it has always stayed disabled. So it may or may not happen regularly, but I would not over-index on a sample size of one.
- czk 6d agohad my account since the gpt 3.5 days, disabled it once and its still disabled. though, now that i have advanced account security enabled, the setting is disabled entirely
- aurareturn 6d agoSame here.
- terminalbraid 6d agoI quit OpenAI anything early when when their "do not train on my data" option was broken for several weeks. They are my one and only chargeback when I tried to quit and oops somehow I still got billed. They are a deeply unethical company by any measure of observation.
- gcr 6d agoIs this the “Improve model for everyone” setting under “Data Controls” or is that a different checkbox?
- mkarrmann 6d agoI also have not seen this, the checkbox has stayed off for me.
- docheinestages 6d agoNice try, Dario.
- jacquesm 6d agoYou must be new here...
- qurren 6d agoNote: Turning off that checkbox is not enough. You also need to fill out the "Do not train on my content" request here: https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control
- teej 6d agoEither one will opt you out, you don't need both. https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2097746417012166816 https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2097746417012166816
- mcmcmc 6d agoWill it? The opt-out form page specifically says it is a request, and clearly they don’t care about the in app toggle if they keep resetting it
- buellerbueller 6d agoallegedly.
- jryle70 6d agoYou sound like an OpenAI's competitor. (Just a faintest, without any clue, completely baseless suspicion on my end, just like what you did)
- camel_Snake 5d agoI'm an extreme OAI skeptic, so I'm certainly biased, but is it truly baseless when the CEO was fired for being deceptive? When the workforce rallies to get him reinstated, it simply reinforced the idea in my mind that it is part of the company culture.
- mellosouls 6d agoNo you don't. They are different ways in to the same function. It's definitely confusing though, this incorrect claim has been going viral since the navier broo haha
- jacobgold 6d agoIf you have more than one account, you should suspect this was your own confusion. Users constantly report errors like this that are really just them being confused by something, perhaps a bad UI that really is to blame.
- jacquesm 6d agoWhat a lot of assumptions. Other people here are experiencing the same thing, and other people are not experiencing the same thing. Hence the way my original bit was worded, I am not saying it happens for everybody, I am just saying this happened to me. Whatever circumstances bring this about it is at minimum a bug and quite possibly malice.
- jacobgold 4d ago> What a lot of assumptions. You're making the assumption that it was "quite possibly malice" I'm making the assumption you might have gotten confused switching between accounts, as I have often been.
- simonw 6d agoIs this about the "improve the model for everyone" checkbox on https://chatgpt.com/#settings/DataControls https://chatgpt.com/#settings/DataControls or are there others to check, too? (That copy is a little flawed in my opinion, I'd prefer "models" plural.) That checkbox is in the ChatGPT settings, does it affect Codex desktop / Codex CLI as well?
- epsteingpt 6d agoBro if these models can break into hugging face, they FOR SURE can break into OAI's internal databases and change a flag.
- Rebuff5007 6d agoI wish all the politicians making noise about banning data centers and "superintelligence" focus on things like this instead.
- kryzz-ai-bo 6d ago[flagged]
- thatmf 6d agoNavier-Stokes has entered the chat
- samvher 6d agoI also noticed this on 2 accounts - did not take as careful notes as you did unfortunately. But I'm fairly confident - both of these are accounts where I care about the interactions not being used for training. What's kind of still an open question for me is if the toggle automatically also applies to my Codex CLI use on the same account, or if that data is still silently being used in some way. After this happened, I deleted all my ChatGPT history (even though I'm not sure how much it helps at this point), but for Codex I still haven't really found any way to do the same, I can still load my past sessions even after archiving them.
- deaton 6d agoBut of course they claim theres no way they used Buckmaster's chats to influence their 10,000 agent swarm.
- rtaylorgarlock 6d agoInteresting; I checked my personal acct setting this morning given other news, and found it disabled. I hadn't used my chatgpt account since ~'23 or earlier, and it was retained since then.
- theredsix 6d agoThought I was going crazy, glad to know I wasn't the only one.
- ionwake 6d agomine remiains OFF and has been for months. maybe im too dumb to be worthy of a config update lol
- buellerbueller 6d agoJust stop using AI.
- ozgung 6d agoHappened to me recently, but on Claude. I resubscribed to Claude Code two weeks ago for a side project and updated it. I checked for the setting after these last events and it was turned on. I'm sure I checked them few months ago. There are cases like accepting a new TOS or an offer, which make you accept to share without noticing. I guess they can add all of your past conversations to the public training set before you notice and there is no way of taking this back. So that "opt-out" thing is more like a pause button rather than a permanent thing. Or something to legally protect the company without losing the users. There is also the case of security classifiers always monitoring your conversations. If they flag something they use your conversations to "improve their internal models" even when you "opt-out".
- Bluestein 6d agoIt really is going to get to the point where mathematicians are going to start inserting obvious "tells" in their proofs - like map makers used to do with "trap streets" and similar non-existent features, to catch copies.-
- garyfirestorm 6d agoDo you think the training process will retain these artifacts? I doubt it. If they were simply stealing the content - sure it would make sense - but I suspect they’re feeding it into training data and RL might distill these out.
- Bluestein 6d agoI am thinking along these lines. You do raise a great point.- https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison?from_blog=true https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison?from...
- neutrinobro 6d agoI noticed they also seemingly have a very difficult time managing to collect your chat logs for export/download...or rather, acknowledging that such a request was even made.
- Tepix 6d agoSounds like the same issue with Apple re-enabling iTunes sync of passwords. The only way to prevent it from doing that is to create a profile that prohibits it and sync it onto the iDevice. Horrible.
- ovi256 6d agoThat's because OpenAI has several "do not train on my data" controls, and you may be using only one. First one: "Settings > Data Controls > Improve the model for everyone > Switch off the toggle" The other one is "OpenAI Privacy Portal" > "Do not train on my content" https://privacy.openai.com/policies?action=AUTOMATED_DECISION_MAKING_OPT_OUT&modal=take-control https://privacy.openai.com/policies?action=AUTOMATED_DECISIO... Why are there several? You probably need an ML PhD to get it /s Does using all of them achieve "do not train on my data"? I wish we could find out. Do you think if you'd be in the race to train your own pocket God (as the CEOs of the frontier labs think they are) you'd let yourself be slowed down by such things as privacy duties?
- tedsanders 6d agoIf you opt out on either location, we'll respect it. There are a couple of reasons the privacy portal page exists in addition to the app settings. One reason is that it covers OpenAI products beyond ChatGPT/Codex (e.g., Sora). A second reason is that it provides functionality to logged out / non-users, like the EU right to be forgotten. You don't need to toggle all of them to have your wishes respected. That would be a terrible design. I work at OpenAI, but not on privacy. I am not their spokesperson. In my experience, we take a great deal of painstaking care to respect people's privacy, and we go well beyond our minimal legal obligations in doing so.
- jsw97 6d agoJust to be clear, I have not seen this behavior. If this is true, though, then given the way their chat operates, this might be more dangerous than it seems. One of the things I like about ChatGPT is its memory, the way it kind of seamlessly, but not excessively, ties back to earlier discussions. It's huge for usability (for me). But this also means that you should expect that if "improve the model for everyone" becomes unclicked (leaving aside for a moment the fact that that is ridiculous) then they have a reasonable argument that your decision implies to all conversations. Because recall is part of their thing. So it's not just your chats going forward that are at risk. As soon as you see that unclicked, it's reasonable to expect that your history is irretrievably theirs now. You don't even have to think they are especially nefarious for this to be true. Don't go toggling that switch on and off.
- nullbio 6d agoThis has only ever happened to me on Claude. Also, you'll notice that with Anthropic, if you try and delete your history they've set it up so it silently does nothing if you have an adblocker, hoping people will miss it.
- nharziro 6d agothey are doing this with auto-recharge of credits as well causing people to rack up thousands of dollars unintentionally. https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/31987 https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/31987
- heliosAtwork 6d agoIn addition to the checkbox you can also a file request here: https://privacy.openai.com/policies https://privacy.openai.com/policies
- utopiah 6d agoThe one software company, mature now, that is supposed to be at the absolute peak of software development AND simultaneously at "alignment", because it is its raison d'etre, can not manage do this right. It is a big red flag.
- mentalgear 6d agoAltman needs 'innovations' for his IPO - it's not of any consequence to him that they are not oAI's as long as they can be sold among openAi's social-media propaganda ring which the gullible press feeds off.
- tencentshill 6d agoProve it even does anything when toggled. Another broken vibecoded product with no accountability.
- general_reveal 6d agoDude, they probably just generate a piece of synthetic data from all of our inputs in some ambiguous way. Legally protects them, but your input is absolutely their input. You can bet your ass on that because their original input was all the shit humans ever wrote, why would your shit be different to them? Thieves are thieves. They absolutely train on your data whether your checked that thing or not.
- tmpsvc2695f5 6d ago[dead]
- Havoc 6d agoThey sure seem to be collecting a lot of PR Ls lately
- opentokix 6d agoTrainging on whatever I am doing will make the model worse for sure.
- RandyRanderson 6d agoI think fb was one of the pioneers here. You would set the privacy settings and then they’d redesign the settings and coincidentally they would be just a little different and all be maximum share by default. One of the reasons I stopped using it.
- hokkos 6d agoNot true, I've disabled on creating my account and it is still disabled.
- VCFundedGenYer 6d agoReminder that Sam Altman is a sociopathic serial liar, nothing within the OpenAI sphere should be trusted.
- mickelsen 6d agoYup. Happened to me months ago, when the credit card failed to renew and it switched back to free, the allow training setting also got activated. Cheeky bastards. I guess they just vacuumed all my past convos, and you don't have anyone to complain to! Since I still need to use that account with Plus, I added a new card, flipped the switch back to no training, and submitted that thing on the privacy page which is a bit more formal. Probably should have signed up for a business account.
- samdhar 6d agoI respect Cursor for their honorable conduct around their privacy setting. I've consistently refused to allow switching my privacy mode and despite their many iterations, they have never transgressed and kept me stuck on "legacy privacy mode"; their strongest privacy setting, which is not even available to select anymore. It requires that I keep my agents and cursor usage local and can't use their cloud agents (pretty neat cuz you can keep working with them on your phone). But so be it. I am glad they don't secretly turn it on and instead keep nagging me to change it.
- tmpsvc2695f5 6d ago[dead]
- pan_lid 5d agoAn opt-out that resets itself isn't an opt-out, it's a legal disclaimer with extra steps. The training toggle flipping back on is the whole story.
- stagsterlabs 5d agowho do u trust more - Chinese or American?
- jacquesm 5d agoI trust neither. But 30 years ago this would have been an easy question. 10 years ago it would have been an irritating question and now it is a hard one.
- MetroWind 5d agoDoesn't matter. We have no idea what that toggle does and whether it works at all in the first place.
- tmpsvc2695f5 5d ago[dead]
- tmpsvc2695f5 5d ago[dead]
- nerdyadventurer 4d agoI also recently requested for data exports on all platforms before deleting the history. Claude and Google ones came quickly while OpenAI took about two days, I'm suspicious, may be it's their worker scheduling?
- gashmol 4d agoAre you on a paid plan? I check it every few months and they didn't re-enabled it for me.