It says “opt-out” in the title.
Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.
It says “opt-out” in the title.
Indeed. Firefox already has “sponsored links” and such in the built-in homepage, I simply disable those when I first install it and get on with life.
Big projects like Firefox need big money to support it. If you don’t want it to be beholden to Google it needs to find ways to earn some on its own.
I’m in a campaign (with rotating GMs) where I’m playing a character who is literally an alien infiltrator that has infiltrated the party. Except he’s really bad at it and it’s obvious he’s an alien infiltrator, and because he’s bad at it he has no idea that it’s obvious. The party’s superiors told them to play along for now and try to find out what my character is up to.
It’s been about four years now, going on five, and I practically had to spoon-feed them useful tidbits about his mission. I’ve finally just kidnapped them all and took them back to my homeworld, we’re now running through the adventure where they escape. I had to put an alien diplomat in their cell to monologue information about them.
Still, I’ve been having fun so I don’t mind. Just amusing how much PCs are willing to trust other PCs simply because they’re PCs. :)
Sometimes it’s different for NPCs, but not always - in another campaign just now the party encountered an Aboleth who told them that he was a good Aboleth that wasn’t interested in mind control or manipulating anyone. And by the way, there’s this list of quests he’s working on and he’d appreciate some help. They jumped right in. He actually is on the level, but come on - Aboleth. If there’s anyone to be instantly suspicious of it’s someone like that.
This is another example of a scary sci-fi novel needing a very specific set of circumstances to arise in order for the scary sci-fi novel’s story to work. It isn’t a plausible case to be basing any real-world decisions or science on.
It’s like trying to have a serious discussion of vigilantism and the death penalty and someone brings up Freddy Krueger as the basis for their argument.
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.
No problem. I’m not a lawyer myself, mind you, but I’ve encountered issues like these enough times over the years that I feel I’ve got a pretty good layman’s grasp. Plus I’ve actually read some of these ToSes and considered them from the perspective of the company running the site, which I suspect most people arguing about this stuff haven’t actually done.
I wish the Fediverse sites running without rigorous ToSes well, of course, but I suspect failing to establish clear rights to use the content people post on them is likely to end up biting them in the long run. At least the bigger ones. Hobby-level websites get away with a lot because they don’t have significant money on the line.
If this is to be a Fermi paradox solution (which the Dark Forest is usually presented as) then it has to be universal. “Sometimes a civilization somewhere decides to kill a few potential rivals” isn’t enough to explain why the universe appears to be silent.
You could ask a lawyer, I suppose. But the basic gist of this is “we don’t know what we might need to do with this data in the future, so we put ‘we can do anything with this data’ into the ToS so that we know that if the need arises we won’t find ourselves unable to do what we need to do with it.” Any website that doesn’t do this could find itself unable to implement new features or comply with new laws they didn’t think of when crafting the original ToS.
At the very minimum a ToS needs to have some way to update and apply retroactively to old data, which ends up being “we can do anything with this data” with extra steps.
Have you not experimented with LLMs? They come up with new things all the time.
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.
The Dark Forest theory is something that makes for a scary sci-fi novel, but it isn’t really plausible in the real world. One of the major reasons is that individually doing atmospheric analysis for every planet in the galaxy actually is an entirely possible task, especially for a civilization that’s supposedly advanced enough and close-by enough to be able to destroy our civilization somehow. If advanced alien civilizations were present in our galaxy and had the philosophy of destroying potential competitors before they also become advanced then we should have been wiped out hundreds of millions of years ago already. We shouldn’t exist under a Dark Forest scenario.
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.
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.
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 wouldn’t really trust that promise, frankly. I just checked their terms of service and it has the usual clause:
You must own all rights, title, and interest, including all intellectual property rights, in and to, the User Content you make available on the Services. ASSC requires licenses from you for that User Content to operate the Services. By posting User Content on the Services, you grant ASSC a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, reproduce, distribute, perform, publicly display or prepare derivative works of your User Content.
Which isn’t really surprising, it’s standard boilerplate for a reason. They don’t want to be caught in a situation where they can’t function legally any more. They say they won’t sell the company or your data, and they might even believe that right now, but who knows what the future might bring? They have the ability to do so if the circumstances arise.
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:
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.
Indeed. I frequently use LLMs as brainstorming buddies while working on creative things, like RPG adventure planning and character creation. I want the AI to come up with new and unexpected things that never existed before.
If I have need of the AI to account for “ground truths” then I use things like retrieval-augmented generation or database plugins that inject that stuff into the context.
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.
I find a ton of uses for quick Python scripts hammered out with Bing Chat to get random stuff done.
It’s also super useful when brainstorming and fleshing out stuff for the tabletop roleplaying games I run. Just bounce ideas off it, have it write monologues, etc.