Facebook and other services are happy reading your private chats as well.

> Public posts on the internet are acceptable (to me).

Everybody needs to rethink this again.

Before LLMs the barrier to entry for building a character profile based on your various public posts was quite high. Remember "Psychographics" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychographics) and the infamous "Cambridge Analytica"?

Earlier it involved data mining, data cleaning, structuring data, building models, running algorithms and then evaluating the results for semantic information. Now it is straight to unfiltered semantic inference using a single sentence prompt (eg. point it to your HN profile and see what you get).

I actually did this on my HN profile and found it troubling. There were many unwarranted/hallucinated inferences due to the fact that it requires "commonsense reasoning" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonsense_reasoning), understanding human motivations and behaviour, context, assumptions, societal knowledge etc. which LLMs are bad at.

PS: You can cut-and-paste the above paras into a LLM prompt and ask it to elaborate for further details. The system itself will explain to you the problems/deficiencies which are quite scary.

Every single internet connect piece of software there is probably collects telemetry at this point. Why would this be any different? You know google logs your search data as well right? Not just the companies scan it but law enforcement too.

But the very fact that you go to "chatgpt.com" and write to them; "Dear Diary, today I thought.."; there is no reason they would not receive and process your data, unless explicitly promising not to (which also requires us to trust them).

The fundamental rule in this case is that if we offload our data to a cloud provider we can assume they read it, if they can, unless they promised very clearly they will not.