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The Almighty Buck AI Privacy

Tumblr and Wordpress Are Preparing To Sell User Data To OpenAI and Midjourney, Report Says (404media.co) 42

Posted by msmash from the inevitable dept.
Tumblr and Wordpress are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, 404Media reported Tuesday, citing a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documents. From the report: The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation we've reviewed, but internal communications reviewed by 404 Media make clear that deals between Automattic, the platforms' parent company, and OpenAI and Midjourney are imminent. The internal documentation details a messy and controversial process within Tumblr itself. One internal post made by Cyle Gage, a product manager at Tumblr, states that a query made to prepare data for OpenAI and Midjourney compiled a huge number of user posts that it wasn't supposed to. It is not clear from Gage's post whether this data has already been sent to OpenAI and Midjourney, or whether Gage was detailing a process for scrubbing the data before it was to be sent.
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Tumblr and Wordpress Are Preparing To Sell User Data To OpenAI and Midjourney, Report Says More

Tumblr and Wordpress Are Preparing To Sell User Data To OpenAI and Midjourney, Report Says

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  • Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sit1963nz ( 934837 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2024 @02:31PM (#64273256)
    More and more privacy means lying.
    It should be illegal for companies to on sell your personal information.
    Put in massive fines for breaches , for each piece of info, ensure these companies do not collect and store more information than needed, and stop it being seen as another "income stream" and instead being seen as a liability.

    • But these people agreed to this when they signed up. Are you saying you want to restrict people from freely entering into these sorts of agreements?

      • "Freely" ???? exactly where can I say NO ? If you mean the consumer is extorted into saying "I agree"... that is NOT freely.

        • No one is forced to use Tumblr. I can't remember ever being forced to agree to something like this. Can you provide a real world example?

          The reality is if these platforms didn't get you to agree to sell your data, then these platforms wouldn't exist. You make a decision about the value of a "free" service and the value you put on your privacy and decide which is worth more to you. This is a fundamental aspect of free markets and contract law.

          • So you are happy your personal information can end up in China as part of their "select partners" ?
            Where does your information being sold end ?
            IIRC facebook one boasted they knew where everyone in the world lived to within less than 1/2 a mile or something. They also knew their marital status, sexual orientation, income, debts, what web sites you visit, any false names you may use, your job, your friends, etc etc etc. Basically there is nothing about your life they do not know because someone sold them t

            • I don't use Facebook or Tumblr. The only thing Facebook really knows about me are things found in public records. I can't even find myself on Google or Facebook without knowing some of that personal info in the first place. Searching for me is essentially a black hole unless you already know where I live, or what sites & handles I use.

              • Ahh ignorance is bliss.... You search for public information, they build up profiles based on web tracking info, every web page you go to that has the little [f] symbol for Facebook gathers info on you, they buy info on you from data brokers, get stuff from public records via data scraping. Any of your friends mention you, post pictures of you etc etc is collected and collated. YOU HAVE ZERO PRIVACY and zero rights to it as far as advertisers are concerned.

                • Yet they can't tell what gender I am. Weird.

                  • Nothing is ever perfect. Or perhaps based on your online activities they believe they are right...

                    • It's not just imperfect. It's indistinguishable from random selection. Just because you don't know how to stop these companies from generating an accurate shadow profile of you doesn't mean the same for the rest of us.

                    • Ahh yes the "I can" argument, and then pile the blame on those that can't/don't know how.
                      How about putting the blame where it actually belongs, the ones who are collecting, collating, and selling the information.

                      You seemingly have the belief that because some of the information about you is wrong it all is. Have you ever though that the incorrect information is used by other companies to your detriment ? How do you know ?

            • Most ad networks seem to think I'm a middle-aged woman, actually, which is kind of hilarious. You can almost see it struggle to identify me, latching onto any new datum morsel in the desperate hope of finding my demographic.

    • It should be illegal for companies to on sell your personal information.

      Your personal information is the information that you, personally, know or possess -it is private only until you share it with another person. It is not the same as information about you.

      Information belongs to whomever is in possession of it. This is why we can write biographies about people. It is why we can write news stories about events and people. These traditions predate modern civilization and are grandfathered into our modern legal systems with few restrictions.

      Your personal information is prot

      • Re:Privacy (Score:4, Informative)

        by sit1963nz ( 934837 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2024 @05:33PM (#64273950)
        And yet when we bought a pregnancy test kit for our daughter, we got inundated with adverts for Baby clothes etc etc etc

        There is a difference between biographies and information collected and sold.

        Oh and big surprise, 96% of people do NOT live in the USA and their rights are just as important. More so because it is so often US corporations who abuse peoples privacy. The EU has a better grasp on reality for privacy of information.

        • The funny thing is, you're saying this as if it had a big negative impact on you. You got targeted advertising. Whoop de do. As long as your legally protected against discrimination based on the information it shouldn't matter if someone assumes your kid is pregnant for the purpose of targeting them ads.

          • How do you know if you are being discriminated against ?
            Do you have access to see if the information they hold about you is accurate ?
            Who / how many have that information ?

            That information is used way beyond targeted adverts. You naively think it's not being used for other purposes ?
            How do you know your health insurance has no bias due to your food/alcohol/recreation (or lack of it) habits ?
            What about jobs, ever miss out on one ?, perhaps your association to someone criminal is too close, or your por
    • It should be illegal for companies to sell your informations at all. But wait, selling personal information is already illegal just as selling copyrighted ones from which you have no rights to either! You'll need some kind of license for that and these needs an actual signed arrangement with the individual right holder! ToS are not considered as such! We don't really need new regulations or laws, we need to enforce the ones that already exist and cover most of these cases!
      • The "punishments" are so low they are simply considered a cost of doing business., so they do not care.

  • 4chan could do the same, but opposite.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2024 @02:31PM (#64273258)

    "Pay us 10 million, or we're getting our data in your training data somehow"

  • that 90% consisted of giant collages of blowjob gifs??

    Seems like an important advancement, I expect great things

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      Yes, it was the thing that most people went in for the porn, but then they decided to ban porn from the platform with great results

  • Now you all know.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TigerPlish ( 174064 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2024 @02:47PM (#64273324)

    Now you all know.. just exactly how you're the product.

    Ads tack-welded to your eyeballs wasn't enough. Now your very posts are up for sale.

    Waiting for the announcement saying that Slashdot is doing something similar. Any day now.

  • Common Crawl means that they already have the data.

    • OpenAI competitors are preparing for a supreme court ruling going against OpenAI, it's the easiest way to catch up.

      OpenAI is now pot committed to fair use, if it doesn't happen they're dead ... and they might even drag Microsoft down with them.

  • Wordpress? (Score:3)

    by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2024 @03:58PM (#64273654)

    Do they mean Automattic/wordpress.com? I don't see how the Wordpress foundation has any license to content on Wordpress sites.

    • How about this. If I am Wordpress, I create a plug-in that sends your site's html/css (gzip'd) to the mothership everytime someone opens your page.
      You know, for analysis and feedback of your html and css.
      And displayed very non-prominently on the mothership webpage is a disclaimer that states that all submissions are considered non-exclusively licensed by the submitter (your site)
      to be used anyway I want, perpetually.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by NaCh0 ( 6124 )

      At this point, the free dot-org version of wordpress has become a nuisance to a huge cash in by the cabal running Automattic.

      This is clear with every update of wordpress and all of their differently branded but still owned properties such as woocommerce.

      The "wordpress" naming is kept intentionally confusing so that the normies don't see the flip coming.

    • TFA at least says Wordpress.com, the summary is misleading by leaving out the .com part. No, wordpress.org won't sell anything and your self hosted wordpress website won't sell anything.

  • All this money being thrown around for my content - where's my share of the money?

    I don't understand how this is legal. Does the ToS give them copyright to the data I post on their platforms?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by batkiwi ( 137781 )

      How much did you pay to use the service, or was that provided in return for your content?

      • "Does WordPress com own your content?

        You own your own content, WordPress.com does not retain rights to your content. But you do grant them a royalty free world wide license to display your material – else they would not be able to show your content on someones computer screen."

        https://wordpress.com/forums/t... [wordpress.com]

  • One reason why I don't use social media and a lot of other stuff.
  • They looked at reddit making $60 billion and said whoa! All the websites are going crazy after seeing that. Plus big AI-related websites like those guys or small niche ones like https://betacharacterai.org/ [betacharacterai.org] are getting big again. Expect to see more big deals in the next few weeks. However, just be careful now with your posts because all your data will be fed into AI now.
  • Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I lived it. Targeted Individuals has, numerous times on record, said they can visibly see images. I was able to see UHD images with my eyes closed. I always thought this was trained on Tumblr by some secret organization / military. For one, I looked at a lot of Tumblr. I was scraping it at one point myself for photos and videos. I know it's definitely possible, and these alleged microchips have to be trained somehow. It all works like LLMs and how image-to-brain models wou

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