"That could have been the end of it, but for one thing: as noted by developer Simon Willison, many people no longer trust what big tech or AI entities say. Willison refers to this as the “AI Trust Crisis,” and offers a few suggestions that could help – like OpenAI revealing the data it uses for model training. He argues there’s a need for greater transparency.
That is a fair diagnosis for what ails the entire industry. The tech titans behind what’s been referred to as “Surveillance Capitalism” – Amazon, Google, Meta, data gathering enablers and brokers like Adobe and Oracle, and data-hungry AI firms like OpenAI – have a history of opacity with regard to privacy practices, business practices, and algorithms.
To detail the infractions through years – the privacy scandals, lawsuits, and consent decrees – would take a book. Recall that this is the industry that developed “dark patterns” – ways to manipulate people through interface design – and routinely opts customers into services by default because they know few would bother to make that choice.
Let it suffice to observe that a decade ago Facebook, in a moment of honesty, referred to its Privacy Policy as its Data Use Policy. Privacy has simply never been available to those using popular technology platforms – no matter how often these firms mouth their mantra, “We take privacy very seriously.”"
I do not intend to have an involuntary Meta account.
In the sense that Meta may have an informal profile on you through your browsing habits, cookies tracking, IP addresses and etc - it may be in some ways that we all have involuntary accounts kept on us with today’s major data brokers.
I don’t see how this could be avoided on web2. We (the user population of the internet) need to transition to open source platforms like this one / other activityhub fediverse capable softwares. There isn’t nearly as much incentive to learn about and try to advertise to us when we don’t allow any sponsored advertising on our instance.
There are other ways to advertise of course. Posting topics about how tasty a food item was, etc, could and should be weighed with skepticism on online platforms. I imagine this instance will stay focused on the DRS niche and so we likely won’t have to worry about that here.
Really interesting discussion all the way around. Thanks a lot for making this topic.
I was indeed referring to Meta.
Here’s an article about the Dropbox imbroglio… https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/15/dropbox_ai_training/?td=rt-3a
It includes these paragraphs…
"That could have been the end of it, but for one thing: as noted by developer Simon Willison, many people no longer trust what big tech or AI entities say. Willison refers to this as the “AI Trust Crisis,” and offers a few suggestions that could help – like OpenAI revealing the data it uses for model training. He argues there’s a need for greater transparency.
That is a fair diagnosis for what ails the entire industry. The tech titans behind what’s been referred to as “Surveillance Capitalism” – Amazon, Google, Meta, data gathering enablers and brokers like Adobe and Oracle, and data-hungry AI firms like OpenAI – have a history of opacity with regard to privacy practices, business practices, and algorithms.
To detail the infractions through years – the privacy scandals, lawsuits, and consent decrees – would take a book. Recall that this is the industry that developed “dark patterns” – ways to manipulate people through interface design – and routinely opts customers into services by default because they know few would bother to make that choice.
Let it suffice to observe that a decade ago Facebook, in a moment of honesty, referred to its Privacy Policy as its Data Use Policy. Privacy has simply never been available to those using popular technology platforms – no matter how often these firms mouth their mantra, “We take privacy very seriously.”"
I do not intend to have an involuntary Meta account.
In the sense that Meta may have an informal profile on you through your browsing habits, cookies tracking, IP addresses and etc - it may be in some ways that we all have involuntary accounts kept on us with today’s major data brokers.
I don’t see how this could be avoided on web2. We (the user population of the internet) need to transition to open source platforms like this one / other activityhub fediverse capable softwares. There isn’t nearly as much incentive to learn about and try to advertise to us when we don’t allow any sponsored advertising on our instance.
There are other ways to advertise of course. Posting topics about how tasty a food item was, etc, could and should be weighed with skepticism on online platforms. I imagine this instance will stay focused on the DRS niche and so we likely won’t have to worry about that here.
Really interesting discussion all the way around. Thanks a lot for making this topic.