this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Reddit: 'We Are in the Early Stages of Monetizing Our User Base' (www.404media.co)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.”

The long-awaited S-1 filing reveals much of what Reddit users knew and feared: That many of the changes the company has made over the last year in the leadup to an IPO are focused on exerting control over the site, sanitizing parts of the platform, and monetizing user data.

Posting here because of the privacy implications of all this, but I wonder if at some point there should be an "Enshittification" community :-)

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[–] coyootje 94 points 10 months ago (5 children)

I'm still happy that I went through the effort to delete all my old posts when I left Reddit a while back. I periodically check if they've restored them and luckily it hasn't happened so far. I do miss some of the bigger communities but overall I'm having a good time on Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I'm sure they have a backup somewhere that they will use to train the AI, but agreed, it is time to leave reddit for good.

[–] hglman 37 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Unless you are in the EU Reddit absolutely did not delete your data.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

Reddit is dumb enough that they probably have a backup they kept of EU users.

[–] Fapper_McFapper 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I can vouch for that.

[–] Rolando 3 points 10 months ago

Well, if you want to be sure that Reddit deleted your data, the time to bring it up is now. Ask questions, contact journalists, demand answers.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Your PII isn't being sold here and you gave Reddit an irrevocable license to your content, so being in the EU doesn't matter.

[–] hglman 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

No, GDPR applies to all data, not just PII.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

The GDRP explicitly only applies to "personal data"

  1. This Regulation lays down rules relating to the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and rules relating to the free movement of personal data.

which it defines as follows:

‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person

Please provide a quote where the GDPR says that it applies to anything but "personal data".

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I wonder what the risks are to including deleted and pre-edited content in training data. Most of the edits are going to be typos and formatting, do you want 2-3 copies of the same message with typos in them for training data? Similarly, deleted comments are mostly nonsense, unhelpful, duplicate, or highly controversial things.

If someone wants to dig through and find individual users to restore that's one thing, but I don't think I'd immediately choose to train off of that other data unless I had to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

It should be very easy to distinguish edits and deletes which were made within a few minutes or hours after writing a comment, from those made months or years later right around the reddit blackout.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Only shadenfreud I have is that my deleted banter that they will assuredly include, will hopefully increase the stupidity of whatever model gets trained on it. Ugh, what a dystopia we’re building.

[–] homesweethomeMrL 1 points 10 months ago

Lol YoU ShOuLd HaVe ThOuGhT oF ThAt SoOnEr

LaNgUaGe FoR tHe MaChInE!!?:/;1

[–] Fapper_McFapper 15 points 10 months ago

After deleting all of my posts and comments Reddit decided to undelete them three days later and then proceeded to lock me out of my own account. Fucking bastards.

[–] PilferJynx 6 points 10 months ago

I just left my comments on. I still use reddit when searching actual human responses from Google. Maybe one day someone might find my archived comments useful in the future.

[–] Coreidan 3 points 10 months ago

I am glad it makes you feel better but the reality is they still have your data. Just because you don’t see it on the front end doesn’t mean it isn’t still in the database with a “deleted” flag set. They aren’t hard deleting your comments.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Deleting your messages is just another data point for them. Reddit can train an AI on the originals and categorize you as a "comment deleter" to give them more information.