this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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265
Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools (www.404media.co)
submitted 8 months ago by alyaza to c/technology
91 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 43 points 8 months ago (2 children)

For any Tumblr users here, this has already rolled out completely unannounced and is opt-in by default. You need to manually opt out, which can only be done on the desktop website. Odds are good that your data is already being sold to Midjourney and used to train their models.

To do so, click on your blog on the sidebar, click on Blog Settings on the other sidebar on the right, scroll down to the Visibility section, and turn the "Prevent third-party sharing for [your blog]" toggle to ON, not off. If you have any sideblogs, you'll need to manually do this for each of them as well. It's per blog and not account-wide.

[–] SoupBrick@yiffit.net 20 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

I was able to do it from the app and it was already on. I don't remember turning it on, so it might be default?

Edit: Just remembered that I did update the app today, so you might need to do that first.

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 8 months ago

it's also at blog settings > visibility on desktop

[–] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

They made an announcement at some point after flipping the switch that noted that some people would be opted out by default based on their blog settings. I think if your blog is set to mature or has certain search parameters turned off already.

It wasn't on for me or several artists I sent messages to who hadn't even heard that this had happened, and the general discourse around it was pretty clearly upset about it not being opt out by default.

They must've updated the app; at the time I wrote that you couldn't do it through the app.

[–] SoupBrick@yiffit.net 4 points 8 months ago

Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the extra info!

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[–] dutchkimble@lemy.lol 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Not bad that you can opt out though, I don't think reddit will give people an option

[–] DaTingGoBrrr@lemmy.ml 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Wouldn't that be illegal in Europe with GDPR and other consumer protection laws?

[–] dutchkimble@lemy.lol 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I guess their TOS will cover them?

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[–] inlandempire@jlai.lu 35 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

How does tumblr keep jumping into bad decisions don't they know their audience lmao

[–] Diotima@kbin.social 32 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I mean, they let themselves get bought by Yahoo and they banned erotic art. Its like they want to fail.

[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Then they got bought automattic, the owners of wordpress.com

[–] Diotima@kbin.social 3 points 8 months ago

Yes, I recall when they had a policy of never allowing account deletion.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 23 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] dutchkimble@lemy.lol 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I agree completely, it is ridiculous and should be stopped immediately, but I don't see a way this problem can be fixed. EU is trying, for example after GDPR all these cookies became horrendously annoying. What you're suggesting will lead to clearer and possibly lengthier EULA or TOS documents but in essence we would still have to either agree with them or not use that service. While a lot of open source and self hosted options exist to replicate many of the services, but you can't rely yet on that for everything.

You can sure as hell double down on strict privacy settings and use a lot of privacy friendly options like librewolf, mull, private dns, nextcloud, matrix/jabber, VPNs, immich, better search engines, Open street maps, and OSes like arch and Graphene.

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[–] eveninghere 19 points 8 months ago (3 children)

It should be illegal for the company to own user-generated contents. They should at least pay the users.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 26 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] eveninghere 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You must be kidding. You surely haven't heard about Fediverse.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] garrett@infosec.pub 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You pay for WordPress.com though. That’s crazy to offer a paid service and use that data in AI training.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.
[–] garrett@infosec.pub 7 points 8 months ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] Computerchairgeneral@kbin.social 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] flumph@programming.dev 18 points 8 months ago

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!

[–] kittykittycatboys@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 8 months ago (6 children)

is there a real fediverse alternative to tumblr yet? i did hear that tumblr was working on activitypub support... but this shows the opposite intentions :<

[–] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That is not opposite, they just want to pull in data from the fediverse automatically so that they can sell it too.

We need some explicit licensing of our public fediverse data otherwise it will just be used to sell it back to us.

[–] tree@lemmy.zip 5 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Yeah I've seen almost no movement against Tumblr while everyone got very riled up about Meta federation ie fedipact, probably a blindspot bc users have positive associations with tumblr, but it's still an ad/data company all the same.

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 9 points 8 months ago

No one actually believes that Tumblr will implement AP

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[–] fracture 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

it's not federated or open, but cohost is a tumblr-alternative run by a group of queer devs who promise not to sell the company or your data. i don't blame you if you don't buy into it, but i do like the platform

https://cohost.org/rc/welcome

edit: based on what /u/FaceDeer@kbin.social has mentioned about the TOS, as well as further elaboration i found in a thread about it (https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1588769277053739010), i don't think i can responsibly advocate for cohost, even as a closed/private alternative to tumblr

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 8 points 8 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] kittykittycatboys@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 8 months ago

i do know cohost, but id prefer fediversed and foss stuff ideally cuz like walled gardens n stuff >w<

[–] petrescatraian@libranet.de 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

@alyaza @kittykittycatboys Friendica, to some degree. It's pretty flexible, and you can have something like a basic blog. You do depend on the server admin to install the themes that you need, if they're not present. Once they're installed, you can switch between them at will.

There is even a Tumblr add-on if there's anyone you need to follow there.

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[–] moitoi@feddit.de 11 points 8 months ago

Think AI as the new tool to make money quickly after crypto, NFT, etc.

[–] petrescatraian@libranet.de 10 points 8 months ago (13 children)

@alyaza Freaking hell, is there any more mainstream social media platform left that does not and does not plan to sell your data to an AI already?!? *sigh*

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[–] Rozauhtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

This sucks, but I'm also morbidly curious of how unhinged an AI trained on Tumblr posts would be.

[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 6 points 8 months ago

First nazi otherkin AI.

[–] yessikg@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Glad I have lemmy and sharkey in these trying times

[–] renard_roux 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

At least it's not going to get sold here, or on Mastodon I guess, but it's not like the data couldn't get scraped by an unethical actor, right? 🤔

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[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

sincerely considering spinning up a sharkey instance as a tumblr alternative because fuck tumblr

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[–] survivalmachine 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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?

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