Imagine this scenario: you’re worried you may have committed a crime, so you turn to a trusted advisor — OpenAI’s blockbuster ChatGPT, say — to describe what you did and get its advice.
This isn’t remotely far-fetched; lots of people are already getting legal assistance from AI, on everything from divorce proceedings to parking violations. Because people are amazingly stupid, it’s almost certain that people have already asked the bot for advice about enormously consequential questions about, say, murder or drug charges.
According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, anyone’s who’s done so has made a massive error — because unlike a human lawyer with whom you enjoy sweeping confidentiality protections, ChatGPT conversations can be used against you in court.
You mean I shouldn’t sign up for an account with somebody else’s chatbot using credentials traceable to me and confess crimes to it?
This is why I only confess my crimes to my local LLM.
What’s the name and IP of your LLM? I also want to confess some crimes.
It’s at http://127.0.0.1:5001. It’s my sex box, though. And her name is Sony.
Lol. LMAO, even.
FBI: No, it’s fine, they have a privacy policy.
I would imagine that the same is true of search engine queries, and the collection of search engine queries is gonna be a lot larger than ChatGPT prompts.
I’ve seen articles mention search history as evidence for years, so no need to imagine.
I would mention that I use Kagi as a search engine, which doesn’t retain search queries (outside a subset for a limited period of time, like a percentage retained for 7 days to counter DDoS attacks). They also have functionality to let people — people who are more paranoid than I am — pay anonymously via cryptocurrency and use search tokens that don’t link individual searches to each other.
Maximizing anonymity with Kagi
We strive to give our customers the possibility to maximize their anonymity. Users who want provable anonymity guarantees may access our service by:
- Creating an account with a pseudonymous email address
- Paying for their plan using cryptocurrency
- Accessing our services via Tor service
- Anonymously authenticating using the Privacy Pass protocol
https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
In general terms, Privacy Pass allows “Clients” (generally users) to authenticate to “Servers” (like Kagi) in such a way that while the Server can verify that the connecting Client has the right to access its services, it cannot determine which of its rightful Clients is actually connecting.
I’d also add that, search query and AI prompts aside, one’s aggregate YouTube history is also likely to have privacy implications, as I expect that most people have watched a lot of content on YouTube and done many searches on it. In 2025, I can’t suggest a reasonable, privacy-oriented drop-in alternative for that, though.
EDIT: Social media is its own can of privacy worms, but at least there people basically understand that they’re putting content out there for the world to see, albeit maybe wanting to do so pseudonymously.
EDIT2: Actually, I haven’t been using it, but Kagi does have a video search, and a bit of experimentation shows that it does appear to index YouTube. I guess I could use that to hide search queries, though obviously YouTube will still have a “videos watched” history, as one would still connect to YouTube for a video itself. And it’s gonna come with some limitations; NewPipe and similar mobile clients don’t have functionality to issue search queries to anything but YouTube directly, so one wouldn’t be able to use a mobile client for searches. I also don’t know whether they permit filtering on everything that YouTube does (or, if they index multiple video sources, whether it’s even possible to filter things on all those criteria; different video services may not expose the same information).
EDIT3: It also appears to only return 48 results per search, unlike YouTube’s search Web UI, where I believe that you can just keep paging through more results as long as you want.
EDIT4: Ah, they show what they index in the search options, since they let you choose which source the videos are from. Apparently it’s YouTube, Vimeo, TED, TikTok, Twitch, Daily Motion, and PeerTube. Huh. I didn’t even know that it was possible to search Vimeo at all. Last time I went looking for a YouTube alternative, I remember looking at it, seeing that the main page had no search form or list of videos, and thinking that there wasn’t any way to search it at all.
Startpage doesn’t track, and you can view result pages via their anonymous proxy. Use that with tor or a VPN and you’re set. YouTube doesn’t like startpages anon proxy though.
Duckduckgo doesn’t track either, and you can view youtube videos in ddg’s site.
https://www.startpage.com/en/privacy-policy
https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
This has been the case for a long time. Plenty of folks have had search history used as evidence.
Sensationalism at its best.
What do you know? You’re just an AI
Yeah, this was famously a huge part of the Casey Anthony trial.
Accidentally doomed yourself, as opposed to intentionally doing it by getting legal advice from ChatGPT in the first place.
Dear ChatGPT, I want to build a spaceship fleet and conquer the Andromeda galaxy and use it to power my AI data center. Can I get in trouble for that? Thanks. Sincerely, LLMAO.
Wow. People really have become stupid. Asking an AI for help in medical and legal questions is among the dumbest thing one can do.
Now, if your lawyer (because they fired their paralegals) asks ChatGPT something while working on your case, can their queries be used against you?
Probably not, but the false case citations that it gives you back can get you in trouble with the court if you don’t double check them. This keeps happening, even though every lawyer in the country should have caught wind of the first guy who got sanctioned for it. Seriously, are there no trade publications for the legal profession? I read up on all kinds of gotchas to avoid in my industry (tech).
Very good point. It seems crazy that this keeps happening, right? My current favourite hypothesis is from “Power and Progress” by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson:
If everybody becomes convinced that artificial-intelligence technologies are needed, then businesses will invest in artificial intelligence, even when there are alternative ways of organizing production that could be more beneficial.
Add to that sunk cost (these firms invested in this tech, and maybe fired the paralegals that used to do this work, so they need to use the tech), and fundamental attribution error (those other lawyers failed using AI because of something fundamentally a part of their selves, I am only fail when there are external factors getting in the way of my self) and you get a recipe for seemingly irrational behaviour on repeat.
Using a search engine for an answer now could get you in that same trap then no? Even DDG has an AI answer generated automatically.
We didn’t need AI for Google search queries to show up in murder cases where people searched for how to clean blood / dna with bleach, how to dispose of bodies, and other really stupid questions. From their home computers. Pretty much right around the time that someone close to them went missing. It’s all timestamped.
Rapp Snitch Knishes by MF DOOM comes to mind
Rap snitches, telling all their business Sit in the court and be their own star witness “Do you see the perpetrator?” “Yeah, I’m right here” Fuck around, get the whole label sent up for years
Love that song!
If you committed a crime and confessed. gPT didn’t fuck you. You fucked yourself up. Asking Google would have been just as bad.
“Dear ChatGPT. I killed a hooker. What are the best ways to dispose of the body? And while we’re at it, can you please give me tips on how to avoid getting caught trafficking meth? Thanks so much!”
-People who deserve to get caught.
…In Minecraft.
