You're right, it's not special.

This is from DuckDuckGo's privacy policy: "We don’t track you. That’s our Privacy Policy in a nutshell. We don’t save or share your search or browsing history when you search on DuckDuckGo or use our apps and extensions."

If the court compelled DuckDuckGo to log all searches, I would be equally concerned.

That's a pretty significant difference, though.

OpenAI (and other services) log and preserve your interactions, in order to either improve their service or to provide features to you (e.g., your chat history, personalized answers, etc., from OpenAI). If a court says "preserve all your user interaction logs," they exist and need to be preserved.

DDG explicitly does not track you or retain any data about your usage. If a court says "preserve all your users interaction logs," there is nothing to be preserved.

It is a very different thing - and a much higher bar - for a court to say "write code to begin logging user interaction data and then preserve those logs."

OpenAI also claims to delete logs after 30 days if you've deleted them. Anything that you've deleted but hasn't been processed by OpenAI yet will now be open to introspection by the court.

I should have said "web search", as that's really what I meant -- DDG was just a convenient counterexample.

DuckDuckGo uses Bing.

It would be interesting to know how much Microsoft logs or tracks.

AI is not special and that's the exact issue. The court made a precedence here. If OpenAI can be ordered to preserve all the logs, then DuckDuckGo can face the same issue even if they don't want to do that.

People upload about 100x more information about themselves to ChatGPT than search engines.