I see talk here and there about how any company or individual can easily use anything we post on Lemmy however they want. This could include AI training, behavior analysis, or user profiling. With the recent news of Reddit data being sold and licensed for AI training, I thought this would be a great time to preemptively discuss how we feel about this topic and brainstorm ways to discourage unwanted use of the content we post.
I’ve seen some users add a license to the end of each of their comments. One idea might be this: Add a feature to Lemmy where each user can choose a content license that applies to everything they post. For example, one user might choose to no rights for their content (like CC0) because they don’t care how their data is used. Another user might not want companies profiting off their posts, so they’d choose a more restrictive license.
I’m eager to here everyone’s thoughts on the whole topic, so to kick things off:
- Do you care how your public data and posted content is used? Why or why not?
- What do you think of choosing a content license for your Lemmy account? Does this contradict the FOSS model?
- Should Lemmy have features to protect user data/content in this way, or should that be left up to the user to figure out on their own?
Data is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity in the digital world. Hopefully these big-picture conversations can help us see what we value as a community and be more prepared for the future.
You might be right, I definitely see your point. ActivityPub adds a whole new layer to this too. In the end though, isn’t the content we post no different than anything else published on the Internet? I guess it’s important to note that technically nothing public can be 100% prevented from being used in unwanted ways. However, there might be other ways (legally, socially, etc.) we could discourage it.
Regardless, I’d love to get a better sense of how much this matters to us here on Lemmy—or if it should even matter in the first place
It’s more akin to handing out flyers to people you meet randomly, with a note at the bottom that they can’t do anything with it. The note might hold up in court, but at the end of the day it’s probably going to be asked why you were handing the flyer out in the first place if you didn’t want people to read it. On top of that, that’s one court, we’re talking about the entire world here, who knows who or what is listening. I think that’s the biggest invert of the head, you aren’t posting to someone’s server like Reddit, you’re throwing it out to everyone who wants to listen.
To me, this doesn’t make a huge difference. If someone wants to train on it, fine, at least we get a free open platform that we can modify however we want. I just also am a bit more careful about what I post.