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!

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 :)

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