This is all public data. People should not be putting personal data on public image hosts and sites like LinkedIn if they did not want them to be scraped. There is nothing private about the internet and I wish people understood that.
I don’t know that that is useful advice for the average person. For instance, you can access your bank account via the internet, yet there are very strong privacy guarantees.
Concur that it is a safe default assumption what you say, but then you need a way for people to not now mistrust all internet services because everything is considered public.
It's important to know that generally this distinction is not relevant when it comes to data subject rights like GDPR's right to erasure: If your company is processing any kind of personal data, including publicly available data, it must comply with data protection regulations.
Eventually, it will catch up. Whether the punishment offsets the abuse is yet to be seen (I'm not holding my breath).
>Internet data is public and the government is incapable of changing this.
Incapable or unwilling (paid for by those who want to grab more data)?
I would claim incapable but it doesn't really matter, outcome is the same.
GDPR won't protect you nor will data privacy laws. Most of the world simply doesn't care enough. I wish it were different.
Edit: to clarify, in the first two examples I'm referring to web applications that the exposed person uses but does not control.
If you post something publicly you cant be complaining that it is public.
no.
> but ...
no.
Depends. In most cases, this thing is forbidden by law and you can claim actual damages.
Daughter's school posted pictures of her online without an opt-out, but she's also on Facebook from family members and it's just kind of... well beyond the point of trying to suppress. Probably just best to accept people can imagine you naked, at any age, doing any thing. What's your neighbor doing with the images saved from his Ring camera pointed at the sidewalk? :shrug:
IMO, it being posted online to a publicly accessible site is the same. Don't post anything you don't want right-click-saved.
Decorum and respect expectations don't disappear the moment it's technically feasible to be an asshole
Based on what ordinary people have been saying, I don't think this is true. Or, maybe it's true now that the cat is out of the bag, but I don't think most people expected this before.
Most tech-oriented people did, of course, but we're a small minority. And even amongst our subculture, a lot of people didn't see this abuse coming. I didn't, or I would have removed all of my websites from the public web years earlier than I did.
In fact it's the opposite. People who aren't into tech thinks Instagram is listening to them 24*7 to show feed and ads. There was even a hoax near my area among elderly groups that Whatsapp is using profile photo in illegal activity and many people removed their photo one time.
> I didn't, or I would have removed all of my websites from the public web years earlier than I did.
Your comment is public information. In fact posting anything in HN is a sure shot way to giving your content for AI training.
True, but that's a world different than thinking that your data will be used to train genAI.
> In fact posting anything in HN is a sure shot way to giving your content for AI training.
Indeed so, but HN seems to be a bad habit I just can't kick. However, my comments here are the entirety of what I put up on the open web and I intentionally keep them relatively shallow. I no longer do long-form blogging or make any of my code available on the open web.
However, you're right. Leaving HN is something that I need to do.
Or that teenager that signed up to facebook should know that the embarrassing things they're posting is going to train AI and is, as you called it, public?
What about the blog I started 25 years ago and then took down but it lives in the geocities archive. Was I supposed to know it'd go to an AI overlord corporation when I was in middle school writing about dragon photos I found on google?
And we're not even getting into data breaches, or something that was uploaded as private and then sold when the corporation changed their privacy policy decades after it was uploaded.
It's not a bad analogy when you don't give all the graces to corporations and none to the exploited.
So if you are asking me, I would have to say yes. I cannot speak for the original poster.
I'm not sure what you mean here? In context I suspect you mean 'because ads were chosen from a perspective of knowledge about you'?? But that's really opposite my experience (UK).
Ads now go hard on brainwashing. Same advert over-and-over, almost never anything I want to buy.
YouTube suggestions are pretty much inline with my previous viewing though.
My ISP has a list of every domain I connect to, my streaming providers know every video we watch, the supermarkets and credits companies know every item we buy at the shops, but still the brainwashing attempts continue for things we'd simply never buy.
We need to better educate people on the risks of posting private information online.
But that does not absolve these corporations of criticism of how they are handling data and "protecting" people's privacy.
Especially not when those companies are using dark patterns to convince people to share more and more information with them.
Literally yes? Is this sarcasm? Are we in 2025 supposed to implicitly trust multi-billion dollar multi-national corporations that have decades' worth of abuses to look back on? As if we couldn't have seen this coming?
It's been part of every social media platform's ToS for many years that they get a license to do whatever they want with what you upload. People have warned others about this for years and nothing happened. Those platforms' have already used that data prior to this for image classification, identification and the like. But nothing happened. What's different now?
Those same modern companies: Look, if our users inadvertently upload sensitive or private information then we can't really help them. The heuristics for detecting those kinds of things are just too difficult to implement.
So you are basically saying you have no sympathy for young people who happen to have not been taught about this, or been guided by someone highly articulate in explaining it.
Is it taught in schools yet? If it’s not, then why assume everyone should have a good working understanding of this (actually nuanced) topic?
For example I encounter people who believe that Google literally sells databases, lists of user data, when the actual situation (that they sell gated access to targeted eyeballs at a given moment and that this sort of slowly leaks identifying information) is more nuanced and complicated.
So my choice in society is to not have a job or get interviews and accept that I have no privacy in the modern world, being mined for profit to companies that lay off their workers anyway.
By the way, I was also recommended to make and show off a website portfolio to get interviews... sigh.
In that case, its not a 'hidden camera'...users uploaded this data and made it public, right? I'm sure some were due to misconfiguration or whatever (like we see with Tea), but it seems like most of this was uploaded by the user to the clear web. I'm all for "Dont blame the victims", but if you upload your CC to Imgur I think you deserve to have to get a new card.
Per the article "CommonPool ... draws on the same data source: web scraping done by the nonprofit Common Crawl between 2014 and 2022."
A more apt analogy would be someone recording you in public, or an outside camera pointed at your wide-open bedroom window.
People who've put data on LinkedIn had some expectation of privacy at a certain point. But this is exactly why I deleted everything from LinkedIn, other than a bare minimum representation that links external to my personal site, after they were acquired.
Microsoft, Google, Meta, OpenAI... None of them should be trusted by anyone at this point. They've all lied and stolen user data. People have taken their own lives because of the legal retaliation for doing far less than these people hiding behind corporate logos that suck up any and all information because they've been entitled to not have to deal with consequences.
They've all broken their own ToS under an air of: OK for me, not for thee. So, yes, the hidden camera is a great analogy. All of these companies, and the people running them, are cancers in and on society.
Of course privacy law doesn't necessarily agree with the idea that you can just scrape private data, but good luck getting that enforced anywhere.