alt Hacker NewsI highly recommend everyone actually read the opinion. It's such a thorough legal takedown of Heppner, you'll learn how the law works and why it doesn't apply to a lot of the made up cases in this thread:
TLDR:
- Claude told him IANAL
- Claude privacy policies say they "may disclose personal data to third parties in connection with claims, disputes, or litigation"
- Work product doctrine, does not apply in the same way to plaintiffs
- Lawyers did not direct him to use Claude (i.e. the laywers did not direct him to do research for the case using a specific tool)
My takeaway is that, as is, I should not do any work without a VPN or in plaintext. Everything else was up for grabs even before this case.
Is a VPN really going to help here? I guess if you can figure out a way to pay Claude anonymously. But if you are charged with a crime and your computer is siezed, and there is some way to discover your Claude account from the contents of your computer, then you will be up a creek either way.
My takeaway is: don't do crime, and if you must do crime, don't use AI in the commission of a crime, in a similar way as it is unwise for criminals to keep recordings of their own phone conversations or what have you (a surprisingly common habit for criminals!).