we like privacy respect on the fediverse

in relation to this: https://programming.dev/post/177829

edit: the problem isn't so much about a bot that uses AI but about not having an opt-out option

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Well, speak for yourself. I don’t have an issue at all with a bot that summarizes publicly available posts and comments.
Meanwhile votes and favorites by username are publicly accessible. I consider that an actual threat to privacy. This here seems more like somewhat pointless anti-AI rhetoric that anyway hardly affects OpenAI‘s ability to collect the publicly available data we post here.
- I'm sorry, but I don't think your opinion is coherent. Why is one public activity ok for harvesting for corporate interests, and another not ok for people to even know?
  The space is public, or it is not. If expecting to have your data scraped by strangers because it exists is something we just have to accept to speak online, why treat a specific kind of speech differently?
  
  Because they're completely different activities?
  If you walk around outside, in a public space, you're gonna get recorded by security cameras that the local market has pointed towards the sidewalk (and likely don't care), but you would definitely care if someone pulled down your pants to take a pic of your underwear. Is that incoherent?
  EDIT: The data can and will be scraped anyway. If they want, they can just start their own instance, federate with everything they can, and they won't even need to scrape it. At least we can get some use out of data harvesting with bots like these.
  
  Is upvoting something the equivalent of choosing your underwear, though? I don't think it is. It's a public action.
  It's complaining that someone recorded your dick in those security cameras because you whipped it out to piss on the sidewalk.
  It's speech, and its effects are public. Wanting an activity where the consequences are public but the actors are not is just saying you don't want there to be consequences for your actions.
  Moreover, it's an activity that is federated, which means if I want to know who's upvoting posts, I can just spin up my own instance and see who's doing it that way, just like with the other form of speech here. When you upvote something on Lemmy or kbin, when you favourite something on Mastodon, or when you use an emote reaction on other fediverse platforms, those are all sent as individual activities to following servers.
  It's all public, even if it's not surfaced.
  On the other side: Just because something is publicly viewable doesn't mean you should have the right -- ethical or legal -- to do whatever you want with it. If you publish a book, should I have the right to scrape it for my AI projects? If so, where is the line that I cannot cross? Can I put it to music and record the whole thing as an album? Can I include the entirety of its text in an ad for toilet seats? It's out there in the public, so clearly that means you've lost all rights to control what people do with it, right?
  Where's the line, and why do you think it's at "updoots"?
  
  because by collecting votes and favorites one can create a full spectrum profile of a user. However, if I decide to write a couple of sentences publicly I already know that it will be scrapped by unlimited companies and I agree that we have to just accept that it will be happening.

26 comments