The New York Times just emerged as an unabashed enemy of privacy, with plans to search people’s private ChatGPT logs.

The Times has been involved in a lawsuit with OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement. Unfortunately, as part of its lawsuit, the Times won its motion to force OpenAI to preserve ChatGPT logs, including chats that were marked as private.

Despite its efforts to fight the order, Judge Ona Wang dismissed claims that forcing OpenAI to retain logs amounted to mass surveillance. Unfortunately, that argument just got blown out of the water, the Times being granted permission to search ChatGPT logs.

According to Ars Technica, OpenAI is trying to negotiate a process that will allow the Times to search the data in a way that minimizes the privacy implications for ChatGPT users.

In the meantime, the Times has clearly demonstrated that it doesn’t care about user privacy, a stand that users should not be quick to forget. As we pointed out in our previous coverage, we pointed out the conflict in the Times’ current position. The outlet has repeatedly covered the privacy sector, calling out agencies and jurisdictions for putting people’s privacy at risk in the interests of fighting crime or improving security.

Nonetheless, the Times is now doing the exact same thing, prioritizing its own commercial interests over the privacy of millions of users, most of them completely innocent.

In short, the Times should be ashamed of itself and users should vote with their wallets, canceling their subscriptions in response to the outlet’s blatant attack on privacy.