this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools (www.404media.co)
submitted 9 months ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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this could not be timed worse for Tumblr which is in huge hot water with its userbase already for its CEO breaking his sabbatical to ban a prominent trans user for allegedly threatening him (in a cartoonish manner), and then spending a week personally justifying it increasingly wildly across several platforms. the rumors had already been swirling that this would occur, but this just cements that they were correct

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[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 26 points 9 months ago (2 children)

They're giving you services in exchange for your contents.

Does nobody even think about TOS any more? You don't have to read any specific one, just realize the basic universal truth that no website is going to accept your contents without some kind of legal protection that allows them to use that content.

[–] eveninghere@beehaw.org 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You must be kidding. You surely haven't heard about Fediverse.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Are you serious? We're speaking in the Fediverse right now. It's notable in its difference. Though instances have their own TOSes, so it'd be pretty trivial to set one up to harvest content for AI training as well.

[–] eveninghere@beehaw.org 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What I meant is that the data generally belong to the user on Fediverse, and your original comment ignored that.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

A user's data still belongs to the user when they post it on sites like Reddit and such, too. The ToS doesn't take ownership away from them, at least not in any case that I've seen. It just gives the site the license to use it as well.

[–] eveninghere@beehaw.org 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I mean, even if that's tue, I don't count it as "ownership" if they change the monetization scheme for what I wrote, without giving me a good chance to say what I get in return. Reddit even allegedly put back comments which users deleted.

It's near-impossible to delete all my own comments on Reddit, for example.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's true, go ahead and read the ToS. It only grants a license to Reddit to use your content. It explicitly says:

You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

And then goes on to enumerate what you're licensing them to do with it. There's also a section titled "Changes to these Terms" about how they can change the ToS going forward.

[–] eveninghere@beehaw.org 1 points 9 months ago

And it doesn't change what I wrote.

[–] garrett@infosec.pub 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You pay for WordPress.com though. That’s crazy to offer a paid service and use that data in AI training.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Hardly. They earn money by being paid by their users, but they can earn more money by being paid by their users and also selling their users' data. The goal is more money, so it makes sense for them to do that. It's not crazy.

From the WordPress Terms of Service:

License. By uploading or sharing Content, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, and non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, adapt, publicly display, and publish the Content solely for the purpose of providing and improving our products and Services and promoting your website. This license also allows us to make any publicly-posted Content available to select third parties (through Firehose, for example) so that these third parties can analyze and distribute (but not publicly display) the Content through their services.

Emphasis added. They told you what they could do with the content you gave them, you just didn't listen.

I'm sorry if I'm coming across harsh here, but I'm seeing this same error being made over and over again. It's being made frequently right now thanks to the big shakeups happening in social media and the sudden rise of AI, but I've seen it sporadically over the decades that I've been online. So it bears driving home:

  • If you are about to give your content to a website, check their terms of service before you do to see if you're willing to agree to their terms, and if you don't agree to their terms then don't give your content to a website. It's true that some ToS clauses may not be legally enforceable, but are you willing to fight that in court? If you didn't consider your content valuable enough to spend the time checking the ToS when you posted it, that's not WordPress's fault.
  • If you give someone something and they later find a way to make the thing you gave them valuable, it's too late. You gave it to them. They don't owe you a "cut." Check the terms of service.
[–] garrett@infosec.pub 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

While you’re not wrong, the social contract we’ve adapted to is that paying means you have some sense of ownership. It’s unreasonable to expect folks to read every Terms of Service with their legalese. Perhaps the new reality we need to accept is that there is no such thing as a good actor on the internet.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Well, a large part of my frustration stems from the "I've seen this for decades" part - longer than many of the people who are now raising a ruckus have been alive. So IMO it's always been this way and the "social contract we've adapted to" is "the social contract that we imagined existed despite there being ample evidence there was no such thing." I'm so tired of the surprised-pikachu reactions.

Combined with the selfish "wait a minute, the stuff I gave away for fun is worth money to someone else now? I want money too! Or I'm going to destroy my stuff so that nobody gets any value out of it!" Reactions, I find myself bizarrely ambivalent and not exactly on the side of the common man vs. the big evil corporations this time.

[–] garrett@infosec.pub 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I don’t really disagree with you at all but repeatedly reminding us all that you’re “not surprised” isn’t the savvy commentary you think it is. Especially since it’s historically been the case that any service you pay money to has said “no, you own your content”.

The marker has just moved gradually on this with companies slowly adding more ownership clauses to their Terms of Service in ways that aren’t legible to average consumers. Now they’re cashing in on that ownership.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I'm just venting, really. I know it's not going to make a real difference.

I suppose if you go waaaay back it was different, true. Back in the days of Usenet (as a discussion forum rather than as the piracy filesharing system it's mostly used for nowadays) there weren't these sorts of ToS on it and everything got freely archived in numerous different places because that's just how it was. It was the first Fediverse, I suppose.

The ironic thing is that kbin.social's ToS has no "ownership" stuff in it either. For now, at least, the new ActivityPub-based Fediverse is in the same position that Usenet was - I assume a lot of the other instances also don't bother with much of a ToS and the posts get shared around beyond any one instance's control anyway. So maybe this grumpy old-timer may get to see a bit of the good old days return, for a little while. That'll be nice.

[–] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Just chiming in, sorry for my bad english.

Your comments are filling me with sadness and despair. You must be the kind of person who years ago warned about all this and most people just laught or called you some creepy tin-foilhat conspiracist. :/

The internet is changing very fast and not for the good. It's somehow comparable what's going on everywhere in the world... Greedy oppressors who only care about themselves, while millions people are suffering...

It feels somehow we have already lost...

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

If it makes you feel better, the thing that annoys me most is not so much that this is happening but more how everybody is suddenly surprised by it and complaining about it. The data-harvesting itself doesn't really harm anyone.

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 1 points 9 months ago

I'm going to destroy my stuff so that nobody gets any value out of it!

I started blanking my Reddit history when they started banning me by retroactively applying new content rules to 10 years old comments... and somewhat hilariously, sold the few MOONs generated from some of that content, so effectively got paid for blank content. 😙🎶