Kleiner Reminder!
In Kürze beginnen #facebook und #instagram ja damit, eure Bilder, Posts und Nachrichten für das Training ihrer eigenen #KI zu verarbeiten.
Sind Daten einmal in KI Training eingeflossen, können diese aus heutiger Sicht nicht wieder entfernt werden.
Will man das nicht, kann zu dieser Verarbeitung Einspruch eingelegt werden.
🇳🇱 Ook zoekmachine DuckDuckGo heeft nu AI standaard aan staan. Om het uit te schakelen klik je op de zoekresultatenpagina op de twee "tennisrackets" aan de rechterkant. Vervolgens kies je in het menuutje 'AI-functies > Beheren' en daar kun je alles uitzetten.
🇬🇧 DuckDuckGo has turned on AI as a standard setting. To turn it off, click on the two 'tennis rackets' on the search results page, on the right side. Then click on 'AI functions > Manage' to turn everything off.
"To develop AI/ML models, our systems analyse Customer Data (e.g. messages, content and files) submitted to Slack as well as Other Information (including usage information) as defined in our privacy policy and in your customer agreement."
Idk why not at this point. The #BridgyFed critics got like everything they wanted. Everything is pretty much #optin. And because of that it's difficult to follow from here the artists I follow at #Bluesky. :satsuki_sadge:
You could say "just ask each one of them to follow you then", but that's easy for you to say. I don't like looking like an unsolicited jerk asking if they want to hear the words of Jesus Christ or something. Which is how I see some of you here on fedi btw. Damn evangelists. No different from techbros or FOSSbros
Now I do think the early stages should be opt-in like a beta as it is right now to iron out the bugs (and there are plenty) before being available fully to the public. But I have a feeling this is never gonna go #optout as it should've been because of the harshness of those ignorant IANALs who do not really understand the #GDPR and other #privacy laws... :reisensweat:
Yet another V.I.L.E. Henchman behind bars, and another Sunday morning well spent running to the encyclopedia to look up where the Ganges flows and all the countries that use Pounds. Still the best--and arguably, the only--educational video game out there. #carmensandiego #livingourbest90slife #optout
Do you have a Wordpress.com site and are concerned about the recently announced AI scraping? Here's the opt out (site name redacted) under Settings #OptOut#EffAI
The latest drama is that Automattic is about to sign a deal with OpenAI to train AI on WordPress.com and Tumblr content.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. Everyone also conveniently forgot to even mention that OpenAI probably already had crawled most if not all of WP and Tumbler.
Automattic also allows users to opt out and that fueled the Opt Out/Consent discussion that started a bit earlier. I’ll get to it later.
Just the day before (or it feels like it) Google signed a deal with Reddit to get all the data to train their AI.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. Everyone also conveniently forgot to even mention that Google of all corps probably already had crawled most if not all of Reddit. The $60M Google paid is a convenience fee to get a nice db bump instead of having to scrap and clean up all that text.
Reddit doesn't let user to Opt Out.
Last week (or it feels like it) one guy wanted to bridge public toots from Mastodon to bluesky.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. Everyone also conveniently forgot to even mention that people could read those toots just using a different client or a browser. All the bridge did was bring toots to a different audience and allowed them to engage with those toots.
The bride also allows people to opt out and that rekindled the Opt Out/Consent discussion that started a bit earlier. I’ll get to it later.
Some time last year a guy built a Fediverse search engine because discovery between instances is terrible.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. Everyone also conveniently forgot to even mention that most toots are indexed by big search engines anyway but because they rank low they just rarely surface in the results.
The search engine also allowed people to opt out and that kinda started the Opt Out/Consent discussion. I’ll get to it in a bit.
Some time later a completely unrelated thing happened. Discord decided that they won’t let people hotlink images uploaded to Discord.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. But also this time people didn’t forget to mention that you shouldn’t use discord for anything you don’t want to lose. Thing like lore, documentation and basically anything that can be useful 5 minutes after it was said better be somewhere else. The reason is Discord servers are private in the sense that you have to use a specific piece of software with an account to access it. Anything posted there is not accessible outside, including through a search engine.
While all this was going on quite a few people in seemingly unrelated fashion were expressing dissatisfaction with interactions they were having on Mastodon. Specifically they were angry about certain types of replies they were getting. The replies were not threatening or insulting but they were not welcome in a way that I’m having trouble articulating. The most common case I saw is someone would post something open-ended or state a problem they have and they would get a bunch of suggestions how to possibly solve it or people sharing their experience either affirming the problem or otherwise.
Some people got very angry about this. They also conveniently forgot to even notice that this is a non-standard arrangement and they want to Opt Out of the more common case provided by the platform.
So finally we’re at the Opt Out. There’s a lot of different takes but the main thrust is that things should be Opt In instead of the other way around. And I agree. Where I don’t agree is that you all Opt In when you post stuff publicly on the internet. Once you do you set your thing free into the world. You resign control over it. You do not expect to opt in to every single read on your blog. If you want to control who access what you write you don’t post it on the internet in public, you send it in private. Consequently you do not retroactively revoke access. You all know that internet never forgets. You can’t unpublished things on the internet. It was already copied, screenshotted, and archived. And you didn’t know what happens to it unless you’re told.
L’ADAGP prend des mesures pour protéger ses membres face à la menace des intelligences artificielles génératives
« L’ADAGP publie ce jour une déclaration générale d’opposition à l’utilisation des œuvres de son répertoire par les systèmes d’intelligence artificielle dans le cadre de l’exception de fouille de données, complétée d’un résumé technique au format xml lisible par les machines. »
We are also working directly with select AI companies as long as their plans align with what our community cares about: attribution, opt-outs, and control.
Emphasis mine
This is not the tech industry’s most egregious lack of understanding of consent in recent years. That dishonor belongs to LegalFling: A blockchain app for sexual consent.
However, this is still pretty stupid, and the result of an insidious trend that doesn’t get questioned enough in software engineering circles. So I’m asking that my readers shout this from the fucking rooftops.
Opt-Out Is NOT Consent
Opt-out is “our lawyers told us to make this an option to cover our ass, but we don’t want you to actually do it”.
Opt-out is “if you missed the memo, we assume we have your consent”.
The default state of any decision regarding user data should be opted out. Users should instead be required to opt in for your decision to take effect, and they must not be coerced into doing so.
If consent is not explicitly given by an informed user, you haven’t received consent at all, and to pretend otherwise is unethical.
Your users don’t fucking care about opt-out. We care about opt-in.
“But Soatok, That’ll Hurt Our Revenue”
If you have to make money doing unethical things, or by following dubious practices that don’t actually respect other users’ autonomy, then you should go out of business.
End of.
What Automattic Should Do
If Automattic wants to make things right, they must do two things and could do a third thing (but I’m not holding my breath):
First, nuke the existing opt-out mechanism and replace it with an opt-in mechanism. If nobody checks it, then don’t include their data in the sale to Midjourney or OpenAI.
Second, they should make the permission for third-parties more granular. Some of us don’t care about third parties, but do NOT want “AI” companies using their data to enable plagiarism.
Third, if you want to go the extra mile, add support for a plugin that uses Nightshade on all hosted media in all WordPress.com plans, including free plans, to increase your users’ protection against LLM scrapists.
This is my open challenge to Automattic leadership to do better.
This Issue is Bigger than Automattic
The tech industry has gotten very bad at respecting users’ consent lately. Your options are no longer “Yes” and “No” anymore. Instead it’s “Yes” or “Maybe Later”, without a “Never” option.
ugh not even @signalapp is safe from the unstoppable deprecation of consent in favour of “not now” pic.twitter.com/sW4Ss2pqMb
It does keep going. I’m going to skip a few, but check it out.> the unstoppable deprecation of consent in favour of “not now”, episode 18 pic.twitter.com/CRdfujOBZt
Yes, even Linux is affected.Even worse, you can rarely uninstall the crapware that nags you with these consent dialogs.
This needs to stop. It’s a toxic mentality and it cultivates a culture that doesn’t respect humanity. (Which is kind of funny to write as a furry blogger.)
If you work in the tech industry, scream very loudly about properly implementing human-respecting consent controls into your software.
Just because it’s widespread doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. Push back against it. Your less privileged, less technical neighbors deserve better.
Our new #encyclopedia just arrived and the kids and I are giddy with excitement. Enough AI generated garbage is sludging up the internet that Google is no longer a research tool, just a portal to BS. #optout#neoLuddism
Windows automatically added a preview of its "AI" Co-pilot to my taskbar. I opted out of data collection, opened a feedback window, and wrote to tell MS that I actively do not want unethical and wasteful technology forced upon my existing system. Then I removed it from showing up in my taskbar. #AI#Windows#Copilot#OptOut
Those extremist idiots who hate and will attack everyone and anyone who doesn't think like them are giving us a bad name on BlueSky, Reddit, and beyond (wait a couple of days for the tech press to bash us once again)
You know who I'm talking about. The ones who want to dictate how the Fediverse should be managed even though they don't understand the first thing about federation (do they even know that Mastodon is not the same thing as the Fediverse?)
Spoiler alert: the whole Fediverse is based on opt-out. Privacy is almost non-existent here.
The ones who confuse Mark Zuckerberg with its users. The ones who hate BlueSky for no reason whatsoever, but they sure hate it.
The ones who want the Fediverse to be a closed space where only they decide who is allowed to communicate with whom.
I'm really really mad at them right now.
The damage they're doing to all of us is big, believe me.
The worst part? I'm sure they enjoy us, as their goal is to turn as many people away from the Fediverse as possible, most of us (the sane users) included.
In light of current events with snarfed.org and brid.gy fiasco, you can use this tutorial to block by yourself both of them even if there is no reachable account on some of these domains:
#FediBlock snarfed.org and brid.gy for bridging fediverse folks to Bluesky against their will (and in likely contravention of GDPR in the EU) with typical Silicon Valley techbro sense of entitlement:
“[O]pt in results in far fewer users, and users are critical for a bridge to be useful.”¹
PS. I just suspended (domain blocked) both snarfed.org and brid.gy from my personal fediverse instance and saw that there was already one account from one and eleven accounts on the other so my account was apparently already being bridged without my consent.
Those links are now severed and they never should have existed without my knowledge or approval to begin with.
As you tally up the ol’ taxes this year, a reminder that this money goes towards important functions of government, such as determining if pictures of Hunter Biden’s dick can be entered into record.
My wife is looking forward to deleting her Instagram account once she can connect with the same folks from her Mastodon account. Being able to remain in touch with over 100M people who still use Meta products out of the comfort of an ad-free, privacy-friendly platform like Mastodon is a game changer.
...at that moment. Huge communities (e. g. #LGBTQIA+) came here not to be harassed by MAGATs et al.
Changing the fine print might not work either, as this constitutes a major change and could be considered an invalid surprise clause in many countries.
Erring on the wrong side of #GDPDR (#DSGVO) might prove costly when decided upon by the #CJEU some years in the future.
I'd say opting for #OptOut as an instance might be a considerable business risk.
//
I unboxed the Lenovo 5i Chromebook Plus. Just reboxed it. Been using Chromebooks for 10 years. None froze like this one. Loud fan. Dislike the screen hanging below the keyboard when open. The HP Dragonfly Pro is out of stock. Sigh. Damn you @madebygoogle. What to do?
@jeffjarvis Switch to StarLabs Systems!! They are awesome, inexpensive (same price range as the Chromebook), open source, also not a Google surveillance capitalism system! Also light, portable, powerful and pretty.
Get out of that “made by Google” ecosystem, Jeff, it only works against us all. #optout
I volunteer to help you set it up if necessary. :))
Discover how to opt out of CPNI data sharing with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile in my latest podcast episode. 📵 Stop your sensitive data from being shared with parent companies and affiliates. Tune in now! 🎧🕵️♂️
#DataProtection#Privacy#TargetedAds#OptOut: "Several technologies can help individuals configure their devices to automatically opt out of web services’ requests to sell or share personal information for targeted advertising. Seven state privacy laws require that organizations honor opt-out requests. This blog post discusses the legal landscape governing Universal Opt-Out Mechanisms (UOOMs), as well as the key differences between the leading UOOMs in terms of setup, default settings, and whether those settings can be configured. We then offer guidance to policymakers to consider clarity and consistency in establishing, interpreting, and enforcing UOOM mandates."