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Comment by Shrezzing | Hacker News Reader

>in talks with multiple tech companies to license Photobucket's 13 billion photos and videos

>Photobucket declined to identify its prospective buyers, citing commercial confidentiality.

>tech companies are also quietly paying for content locked behind paywalls and login screens, giving rise to a hidden trade in everything from chat logs to long forgotten personal photos from faded social media apps

In this market, ethics seem to exist when it comes to corporate clients, but not when it comes to end-users.

It's immediately and self-evidently obvious that no end-user in 2007 consented to photos of their 2007 era teenage self being used to train an AI how to identify an emo kid.

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Photobucket is a morally bankrupt shell of its former self. They send constant emails with extremely urgent subject lines threatening to delete your photos unless you sign up for a $5/mo plan. They do this even if your account doesn't contain any photos.

This is funny. If they delete your photos then they lose their lever for getting you into a payment plan. Except they'll probably email you a recurring one-time offer to restore your 'deleted' photos for a nominal fee.

> threatening to delete your photos unless you sign up for a $5/mo plan

What's morally bankrupt about that? It costs money to host your photos and they're a business that can decide to charge their customers any rate they think the market will accept.

I have no photos on their service and they've been emailing me weekly since last year with URGENT and ACTION REQUIRED.

> It's immediately and self-evidently obvious that no end-user in 2007 consented to photos of their 2007 era teenage self being used to train an AI how to identify an emo kid.

I can think of worse things than that which might be hidden away for public scraping.

>In former times it was maintained that ownership of landed property extends from heaven all the way down to the center of the Earth, but this doctrine is obsolete, as evidenced by the flight of airplanes.

I vividly remember consenting to all variety of terms agreements as a 13-year old on the web in 2007. I also remember explicitly licensing all of my output as CC and embracing copyleft. It's never been a secret that even captchas contribute to the improvement of models designed to ultimately sell ads to eyeballs.

A lot of people just were not paying attention to the game being played, and so now they're getting played themselves.

When a company hides their skeevy practices in 30-page social media term consent form, I blame them a lot more than the normal person with limited time or the literal child. I’d prefer such people didn’t “get played” by multinational corporations, even if they potentially could have prevented it.

I think it's important to understand that consent was indeed given, and most users likely understood that they did not own any non-copyrightable portion of their user-generated content.

Rather, the conversation should focus on how to improve parsing of ToS (I personally believe we should use symbolic labeling like we do with food), as well as regulation around what terms can change for content which was generated under the premise of an older ToS.

OP's statement, "It's immediately and self-evidently obvious that no end-user in 2007 consented to photos of their 2007 era teenage self being used to train an AI how to identify an emo kid," is simply false. Many, if not most users, understood that they gave permission for their UGC to be used to improve the services. This is what I am rebuking.

It's immediately and self-evidently obvious that no end-user in 2007 consented to photos of their 2007 era teenage self being used to train an AI how to identify an emo kid

Unfortunately, they did actually. It's more accurate to say that they were presented a EULA and Terms of Service that no reasonable teenager would have had any hope of understanding. But since they're over 13, they're held to the terms of those agreements in any case.

These companies are slimy. Make no mistake, this will get worse in the future.

People have known for eons that companies were using their data. TikTok is well publicized to be the CCP. And yet millions of people would rather have entertainment. There are plenty (myself included) who abstain, but the reality is the vast majority of people, if presented with free and unlimited dopamine hits, will gladly give away their info.

> the reality is the vast majority of people, if presented with free and unlimited dopamine hits, will gladly give away their info

I counter that the reality is the vast majority of people do not meaningfully understand the exchange they are making. I'm not saying they're stupid or blaming them whatsoever; it's a similar phenomenon to playing the lottery. Our brains aren't equipped to understand such unintuitive phenomena.

> I counter that the reality is the vast majority of people do not meaningfully understand the exchange they are making.

I’m not sure this is true in 2024 at all. The presumption today is you’re being tracked, and people simply don’t care.

But let’s presume this isn’t true. I think the response should be to expect more from society. Every additional bit of nanny state coddling reduces individual responsibility.

Do you consider such people to blame? Under your own framing, they’re more or less being taken advantage of by a modern form of drug dealer.

Absolutely. Do you think drug addicts have no responsibility for their behavior? Are drug dealers viable without a strong customer base?

There's a funny thing where the legal/commercial definition of "consent" is essentially a subset of "non-consent", having extremely little overlap with "consent" in a meaningful way.

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