Pro tip: sign up for the business/enterprise version when reasonable in price.
I do this with Google Workspace. You can also do it with GitHub.
(Google doesn’t train on Workspace, Github doesn’t train on business customers, etc)
Please don't reward these companies with money.
Yes, I know, it's dicey when people get used to a nice, friendly platform, and the platform gains lots of users, and then at some point (or several points), the terms start getting worse, and people feel misled and betrayed.
I get that. But this is a corporation. Hell, this is Microsoft. It's hilarious how many people think they've actually changed since their antitrust judgment in the 90s. I guess a lot of folks here are too young to remember it, even.
Companies exist to make money. If they are giving you something for free, they are either a) getting something else out of it already, or b) giving it to you for free now and looking for ways to get their own value out of it later. I don't mean that in some sort of cynical, "fuck the world" sense; that's just reality, and that's fine, for the most part.
If you don't like this, don't use free services provided by corporations. Host your own. Yes, I know it can cost money. Yes, I know it's more work. But that's life. TANSTAAFL.
I've had a VPS running for a couple decades on a small provider. These days it costs me a little under $200/year. Much cheaper options exist. I run a web server, gitea instance, matrix homeserver, and a slew of other things on it. It requires very little maintenance because I just run Debian stable on it, keep up with security updates, but otherwise leave it alone. It backs up the important stuff to S3 using duplicity, but -- knock on wood -- I've never had a catastrophic failure that required a restore in the ~20 years its been running.
Obviously the root problem is the incentive structures created by a system that relies on scarcity to assign value to things being applied to things that effectively cost zero to duplicate. Obviously companies are not my friends, I self host everything, heck I even have a local copy of my VPS, it's on solar, I'M fine. I don't expect Github to do good things and make good choices, but that doesn't mean I can't be mad about it when they do things I don't like. Also I live in the real world and have to deal with society and there would be friction I create for myself when I try to exist in tech and refuse to use github, might be a worthwhile trade but it IS a trade.
If the publishing industry can't win a case against the AI firms then you don't stand a chance when you finally find out they've been training on your private data the whole time.
They can tell you one thing and do the opposite and there's effectively nothing you can do about it. You'd be a fool to trust them.
And I don't see any mention that that exempts you from being trained on. (Yes, the blog says you're still covered, but at that price I'd like to see a contract saying that)
...yet
The belief of business users that this will remain true is grounded more in hope than in cold, dispassionate, business based decision making.
If it's not life or death, encrypt every byte of data you send to the cloud.
If it is life or death, you should probably not be letting that data traverse the open internet in any form.
Conspiratorial thinking? Sure. But if you've been around for a couple decades and seen the games these people play (and you aren't a complete sucker), then you'll at least be aware that there's at least slight possibility that these companies can get things from their customers that they (the customers) did not knowingly agree to.