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Even with your rephrasing you’re looking for an answer in absolutes which is generally impossible, but unpacking your line of questioning, what it really amounts to is how “in the know” I am or am not.

To the best of my knowledge I know about every ongoing company AI safety and user privacy initiative, and none of them involve permitting access to copilot user content to any second party or third party entity.

Of course, that’s tautological. I don’t know what I don’t know, but I’m senior enough and with broad enough scope that I’m at least read in on what I believe is the majority of high level business initiatives.

I’m not trying to be evasive, this is just the reality of any organization - I only know what I know. Everything within my scope of awareness indicates that there is no copilot user content access outside of our publicly published terms of service.

by rpdillon8 hours ago|

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Thanks for responding. It's great to hear from someone working these issues day to day, and it's the reason I come to HN. I feel like this particular line of questioning is a bit silly, with all the "Can you absolutely guarantee X, Y, and Z?" Thanks for engaging despite the adversarial turn it has taken!

by csande1711 hours ago|

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I think there's maybe a disconnect here that people are largely concerned with the contents of their private repos, while you're maybe more familiar with how AI interaction data is handled. (After all, the original topic of the thread was X.ai allegedly going above and beyond interaction data to exfiltrate entire repos.)

I personally did get the vibe that you were being evasive, just because the things you were saying didn't quite match what people were asking about, in a way that felt kind of like a corporate legally-not-a-denial denial. It's like, "Hey, has Contoso Apartments hidden a camera in my bathroom?" "Contoso Apartments is committed to your privacy and safety. We have strict controls in place to ensure that our maintenance staff cannot make a copy of your key without notifying you. To the best of my knowledge, we do not have any company initiative that involves opening envelopes addressed to you." Like it's theoretically reassuring for the company to commit to those things, but the fact that they can't directly answer the original question is disconcerting.

Ultimately there's probably not a whole lot you can do about this. Like realistically if Microsoft is doing this, they've probably constructed it in a way where not many people know and/or they can plausibly deny it. So it comes down to (a) Microsoft denies doing it, but isn't making the broadest legally binding commitment possible, (b) does the reader believe Microsoft and OpenAI are trustworthy with respect to privacy and intellectual property issues or not.

I've been in this kind of situation before, and it can be frustrating when people don't believe that you're in a good, isolated department of the company and you're committed to upholding ethical standards. I guess that's why big companies pay the big bucks :)

by taywrobel6 hours ago|

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That’s fair, and I appreciate the more constructively critical feedback! Also worth noting that I’m solidly on the platform service side, and the article here is largely focused on malicious client behavior.

Copilot has a lot of different clients between IDEs, agentic integrations, and GitHub apps. I don’t have awareness of the implementation details of all of them, but I can assure you that we don’t provide APIs like those mentioned in the article being used for data exfiltration.

Clients are responsible for context building, and all go through the same service that does auth, policy and quota enforcement, request routing to the underlying providers all of which have zero data retention enabled unless very specifically excluded from that (looking at you, Fable 5).

by lstodd12 hours ago|

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[flagged]

by JumpCrisscross1 hours ago|

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> If we lower the threshold from "absolutely" to "absent third-party breaches" what would you say?

If anyone answered that question affirmatively, I'd lose a massive amount of trust in them. It would betray they fundamentally misunderstand the stochastic nature of playing defense.