this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
400 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy Guides

16813 readers
2 users here now

In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.

This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.


You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:

Learn more...


Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!

Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!


This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.


Moderation Rules:

  1. We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
  2. This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
  3. No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
  4. Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
  5. Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
  6. Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
  7. News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
  8. Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
  9. No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
  10. No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
  11. Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
  12. General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.

Additional Resources:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Shinji_Ikari@hexbear.net 31 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If the results were also open and public, it'd be a different conversation.

This is more akin to rain water collection up-hill and selling it back to the people downhill. It's privatization of a public resource.

[–] cooljacob204@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is more akin to rain water collection up-hill and selling it back to the people downhill

Not really, anyone can go and collect the same water they are collecting. And it's happening, open source LLMs are quickly catching up and a shit ton of other companies are also crawling the exact same data.

[–] pjhenry1216@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"anyone". I hate when people use this word knowing full well it's not true in meaning. "Nothing is stopping you from spending millions of dollars on your own LLM." Ok.

The web is a bunch of information that is public, sure. People don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy but they used to have a reasonable expectation that their information would be used in a very specific fashion. Especially in the US where there is a default copyright claim on data. And crawling the web may ignore text that states you can't use the data. Even if you include a clause saying by accessing the data you agree to the claim. That only works against little people. The "anyone" that can't actually just go and build a LLM.

[–] cooljacob204@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sure but that applies to literally a million other things. There is an absolute ton of shit that companies do that individuals can't which is still built off of others.

A company can go spend 1B on a new state of the art nuclear reactor which will bring in billions over it's life time. Will the physicist who discovered the underlying math see any of the profit? No, probably not. And if they do it won't be nearly a "fair share". Nor will all the publishers and authors who generated the learning materials that the people working for said company used to build it.

There is tons of public knowledge that can only be utilized with a huge investment, that's just how a lot of innovation works.

And OpenAI also has a ton of competitors. Sure they have the lead for now but thousands of other companies are also scraping and building LLMs.

[–] pjhenry1216@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

You're not really going to win this argument as I'm an anti-capitalist. So I agree a lot of that stuff is wrong too. I don't believe you should own other's labor. The employees should own the company. And I don't believe in copyright, but it does exist and it's enforced against individuals, so it's only fair it's enforced against them as well. I don't think you should be allowed to blindly scrape when information could be behind an agreement to use it in a specific manner if accessed. Plus I think it should be opt in based off it being a new use and therefore a new right of copyright. Just as suddenly actors need to worry if they'll be scanned and owned by a Hollywood studio now. It's something a reasonable person wouldn't expect. And that's why past works are protected from that use.

Things behind a third party privacy policy, sure. You agreed to it, whatever. But your own website? I'm not feeling it.

[–] little_water_bear@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This comparison is lacking because water is unlike data. The data can still be accessed exactly the same. It doesn't become less and the access to it is not restricted by other people harvesting it.

[–] mim@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

While that is true, it does divert peoples' clicks.

Imagine you wrote a quality tech tutorial blog. Is it ok for OpenAI to take your content, train their models, and divert your previous readers away from your blog?

It's an open ethical question that it's not straightforward to answer.

EDIT: yes people also learn things and repost them. But the scale at which ChatGPT operates is unprecedented. We should probably let policy catch up. Otherwise we'll end up with the mess we currently have by letting Google and Facebook collect data for years without restrictions.

[–] Shinji_Ikari@hexbear.net 3 points 1 year ago

it's not a great comparison I'll admit, but it's essentially the same as digital privacy, only one of these is protected in courts and the other is encouraged.

I haven't sat down to really build a stance on this but it does not sit well.

[–] pjhenry1216@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Explain why copyright exists. If copyright exists, what you state doesn't hold legal grounds.