Bryce Rogers presents RAD Collective recommendations on chatbot privacy

My name is Bryce Rogers.

I'm co-lead of the Resisting Automated Disempowerment Collective, or RAD Collective, a grassroots New York City community advocating for city and state policy that protects human life, joy, and democracy as AI and big tech grow more powerful.

We thank the council for reconvening today to finish the job that started last Monday.

Rad wrote a letter to the council with feedback on all 10 introductions, but today my colleague Megan and I want to share more granular recommendations on two introductions in particular.

Council member Murano's chatbot privacy bill and Speaker Menon's third party validation bill.

But first, I'll straightforwardly share two strategic postures Rad assumes in sharing these recommendations.

One, our goal is for AI tools served to New Yorkers to be safe and also to slow down the rate of advancement of frontier AI, given the recklessness and rapid power concentration we're seeing.

Two, our angle with our recommendations today is for this legislation to pass and for companies to comply with it, as opposed to something like signaling or

intentionally extreme compliance burdens to trigger some sort of legal battle or something like that.

I'll speak on affirmative consent in Murano's chatbot privacy introduction.

Many users share deeply personal information with rich context when using AI products.

Tropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and SpaceX AI, by default, collect user chat data and train their models on it.

Some of these companies, like Meta and OpenAI, use personal data for targeted advertising, and Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft combine this data with other information they've collected across their platforms to build a more complete profile of the user.

This is invasive.

Others, like Anthropic, insist they won't sell user data.

But as long as this is voluntary policy, they can walk it back anytime they need the revenue boost.

When Anthropic initially launched Claude, they did not train models on user data and automatically deleted it after 30 days.

In September 2025, they rolled this back to an opt-out regime.

We recommend paring down Murano's bill to focus on the core requirements of affirmative consent for data collection, storage, use, and sale.

It should also be expanded to cover data collected by agentic AI, not just chatbots.

This ensures the strongest version of the most impactful consumer protections can move forward into law as soon as possible.

Thank you, and I look forward to you hearing from my colleague, Megan.

Thank you, and please submit the testimony as well so we can review.

Sure thing.