> Does announcing a spying operation mean that it is no longer spying?

Well, kind of, yeah; the dictionary definition of spying requires secrecy and lack of consent.

> to secretly collect and report information about the activities of another country or organization[0]

The only real debate is whether or not having a clause tucked away in a EULA that few people read makes it a secret. If Anthropic had a big flashing red banner that said "FYI we automatically flag and review any conversations about illegal things!!" on the front page nobody would call it spying.

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/spying

I would call it spying in this sense at a minimum if individual people don't know whether their conversations were stored or disclosed in a way they don't want. For example, suppose someone said "we will monitor the activities of 10% of people". You don't know if you're in that 10% or not, but I would still want to call that spying.

A less central case would be when you clearly do know about the activity but you can't quite see the details, like with behavioral ad targeting or something. It feels pretty normal to me to call that spying even if it's disclosed to everyone and certainly happens to everyone, but it's also a less central example of the concept.

> spying requires secrecy...

Eh. Both Superpowers knew that they were spying on each other all the time, and that was still considered to be spying. But feel free to replace the word "spying" with the phrase "clandestine largely-automated mass surveillance" if it makes you more comfortable.

> ...and lack of consent.

Given

* the fact that the contracts one is required to "agree" to in order to use most services are often novella-length or longer, and frequently include by reference other contracts of similar length

* that nearly all contracts like this have a clause where not only does the powerful party reserve the -very frequently-exercised- right to change the terms of the contract without any prior notice, but said party presumes that you automatically accept the rewritten contract and gives you no option to negotiate

I'd argue that the real situation on the ground -in the US, at least- is that "consumers" have consented to approximately zero of the contracts that -despite that lack of consent- legally bind them.

> If Anthropic had a big flashing red banner that said "FYI we automatically flag and review any conversations about illegal things!!" on the front page nobody would call it spying.

If you change the situation then yes you can in fact change our responses. The problem is you then are no longer talking about the original situation.

It also bears mentioning that providing a dictionary link to “spying” is pretty patronizing/passive aggressive. On par with sending a basic Wikipedia page. You didn’t even bother to post the definition you want to apply.