- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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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Class actions need to be made. Not just against AI, but Facebook, Google, Microsoft, banks… Basically anyone who collects data for profit while slipping it in as a secondary transaction in the terms and conditions, without providing any consideration.
The data brokerage industry is a $400bn industry, yet there are only 8bn people in the world. Even if we assume everyone is online and everyone’s data is of equal value (both are far from true), that means an individual’s data is worth at least $50 per year on the market. These are just people buying and selling data, and does not include companies that keep proprietary datasets and only sell advertising, or the value of peoples’ written works online (which is likely of even greater value). Businesses are now selling off our copyrighted work for far less than its worth, all the while not paying the creator their rightful dues.
It simply isn’t the case that data is traded for access to the website or service. That isn’t how the transaction is presented. Front and centre, the services are offered free of charge (or sometimes, eg with Microsoft, you already pay for the service) and then a second transaction is buried in the fine print in obscure language. The entire purpose of this is deception, so the user does not understand the value they are giving up, and so as to deny them a fair opportunity to assess any supposed value exchange - because it isn’t an exchange, you’re giving it up for free, just like they give you access for free. It’s two separate transactions deceptively run parallel.
You can’t build a car without paying for the nuts and bolts. They steal the nuts and bolts we produce and then sell them on as their own products.
Edit: weird formatting issues from posting with low signal.
There is no hidden transaction, you signed up for a service to:
- Upload your content so they send copies to whoever asks.
In exchange, they used to show you ads, and that was fair. Then, they started collecting your browsing data and selling that too… that is a second transaction, and got regulated. Now, they are selling a service of bundling together the content people asked them to share in the first place.
In your analogy, you asked them to send your nuts and bolts for free. In exchange, they advertised stuff to you. Then they started collecting the addresses of your clients… that was not fine. Now, they’re throwing nuts and bolts from multiple people into a box and selling it as a “sampler kit”, nuts and bolts you did ask them to send for free.
Did you not understand the value of your product? Maybe, but you asked them to do it anyway… and you’re doing the same by posting content right here. 🤷
It is a hidden transaction. They try to argue it both ways, that it’s an exchange of access for data, but then they hide the data in the fine print. When you buy something, the price isn’t in the fine print, it’s front and centre. When you buy insurance, they have to provide a “key facts page” where they detail what you’re paying for in general terms. The key parts being exchanged are supposed to be at the forefront, not hidden in the terms and conditions.
People don’t understand the value of their product because businesses hide that part in the terms and conditions to inhibit their ability to properly assess the value.
In your analogy, you asked them to send your nuts and bolts for free. In exchange, they advertised stuff to you. Then they started collecting the addresses of your clients… that was not fine. Now, they’re throwing nuts and bolts from multiple people into a box and selling it as a “sampler kit”, nuts and bolts you did ask them to send for free.
I didn’t ask them, they advertised their service in bright lights saying it was free. Then, the fine print at the point of entry says they can pick the pockets of their guests.
You really are trying to advocate for the devil here, and I think if you take a step back you’ll see that you’re just parroting the same arguments they make. Such arguments have not been properly challenged yet, but if you stack them up against the core principles of contract law - through which all trade is conducted - they are clearly wrong.
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So after banning adult content a few years ago, Tumblr decided to shoot itself in the other foot? It feels like the people in charge are actively trying to drive off the site’s users.
Fun fact, it’s been two different groups of people in charge! Yahoo! was responsible for removing adult content and then sold it to Automattic for pennies on the dollar. Automattic then went through several rounds of different poor moderation before the CEO himself stepped up to share GDPR violating information on Twitter. Now we’re adding AI!
It should be illegal for the company to own user-generated contents. They should at least pay the users.
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.
You must be kidding. You surely haven’t heard about Fediverse.
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.
What I meant is that the data generally belong to the user on Fediverse, and your original comment ignored that.
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.
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.
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.
You pay for WordPress.com though. That’s crazy to offer a paid service and use that data in AI training.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 😙🎶
No, and no, and no:
- If a user wants to assign ownership to a company, that’s their right.
- These companies DO NOT ask for ownership, they only license the content (ownership carries responsibilities, they don’t want those).
- Whether a user wants to get paid or not, is again up to them (see the various OpenSource and CC licenses).
Hard disagree.
- Companies don’t give you a good chance to prevent them from eroding your control on the data further.
- Even if they technically disown the data, they’re doing even worse. They are de-facto doing anything they want without taking responsibility
- Open source / CC licenses don’t apply to whatever user data people are talking about here
I don’t know what Train AI Tools are, but I’d be ok with them if they had the temperament of Thomas the Train rather than Blain the Mono. How do we know which Train AI is buying our data?
Blaine is a pain, and that’s the truth.
Anyone surprised?
It stinks that what seems like the most critical reporting lands behind paywalls.
