Lee questions companies on data privacy for immigrant communities

Thank you so much.

And that's actually the perfect segue to my question.

I'm asking this more with my former nonprofit executive hat versus my finance chair hat.

And it's really about data privacy and what the potential impact is on so many New Yorkers.

So I agree that one of the benefits of AI and technology that we can think through is, you know, sometimes our government agencies are very siloed and their databases don't necessarily communicate with each other.

So if I want to know if someone is being served in homeless services and also has a comorbid mental health and substance use disorder, how do we know that we're serving people effectively and using that data effectively, right?

And one of the things that we've been hearing also from other folks is that if we just had the housing application and the food stamp application coordinated with each other, it could actually save a lot of work for the caseworkers.

And so those are very real things that I think can be used for good.

However, I think one of the issues that I'm concerned about, especially working with an immigrant community previously, is given what we've seen with public...

charge and potentially with HR1, how do we ensure that AI is not being used to store information

that isn't relevant or information that they should not have access to in order to make sure that our communities are protected?

So how do those two things exist?

So I will start.

So I can't speak to the specific government programs that you reference, but I can tell you about OpenAI's commitment to user privacy, which is that it's central to our product.

We believe it's important for users to retain control over their data.

That's why when you sign up for a ChatGPT account, you're given information about how your data will be used.

That data is privacy protected by default.

So usernames are separated from conversations and personal information is separated from the conversations as well ahead of any use of user data in training.

We also provide users with the option and full control to request that their data not be used for training and also to request that their data be deleted.

So we take privacy very seriously.

Council member, thank you very much for that question.

And we just echo what Morgan said at Meta.

We take privacy absolutely seriously.

It is core to everything that we do.

Privacy and safety go hand in hand.

And it is an absolute commitment of the company.

If I might give an example of our Muse product, for example, you can opt out of training.

You can ask it to forget information that you give it.

You are in control of your data.

And we're also planning on releasing a confidential or encrypted version of this in the future.

If I may, I just wanted to touch upon public services and health.

I know that you mentioned these and these are core points.

This is where we really believe in the value of open weights in terms of being able to really

provide advanced AI for health, for the provision of health services, research and the macro economy in the sense that data is fully retained by those entities.

Ma'am, similarly to my colleagues, user privacy is basic to user trust for us, and so we take it very seriously.

We have privacy policies that are prominently displayed on our website that you can go inspect.

And we also know that user control is central to management of your own privacy levels, especially across our Gemini tools, which is our AI suite of tools.

We also invest a lot in privacy enhancing technologies and encryption as well.

We try to take a layered approach to privacy and security.

And finally, we have an AI framework in particular that combines our security and our privacy practices into one holistic framework to, again, ensure that user privacy.

And we're happy to furnish that to you.

Likewise, at Anthropic, privacy, data privacy, user security is core to our safety commitment.

We make sure to protect user data and user privacy on the platform.

And in addition to that, I would point towards that the way the platform and the models can be used is restricted by our usage policy, which prohibits surveillance,

prohibited law enforcement, criminal justice, and censorship purposes as well.

Thank you, and I look forward to hearing more about what those layers look like as well.

So hopefully I can connect with each of you after this.

So thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Councilmember Maloney.