Also known as profiling.
Which means the powers-that-be have been using it for years already. Remember when people called us paranoid for believing in Echelon in the '80s?
So Reddit is the scumbag steve.
That’s a useless summary that describes 99% of reddit and lemmy users
No wonder I got banned.
Spez will fuck with Reddit’s userbase and make the platform absolute bullshit to use, yet 90% of redditors will still keep sucking his dick over and over again.
“LeMmY iS tOo HaRd To UsE!! wTf Is An InStAnCe???”
If my dumb ass figured it out, anyone should be able to switch.
I think a lot of people on reddit forget that it’s a forum. They see reddit as this special thing, when in fact it’s not. My best description to people about Lemmy is it’s a bunch of reddits that all can see eachother and none are owned by some corporation looking to harvest your info. It’s like reddit, but better. As for which instance? Roll a dice and pick one, it doesn’t matter all that much. I’m on lemmy.world and I don’t even know half the time I just surf around. Other than that anything that makes reddit better then Lemmy is purely due to the fact it has a larger and longer established user base.
I just try to describe it like email. “You’ve got your gmails and your outlooks and your yahoos and whatnot, you pick one you like, but they’re all email and it won’t stop you seeing emails from outlook guys if you’re a gmail guy.”
I think that on the first wave of users when we had 200k active users Lemmy was in a very different state in terms of usabilities. So much has improved and if we get another event like that I’m sure we will retain way more users.
The instance matters: some will ban you if you cite too many credible articles which bring up uncomfortable truths.
No matter what one’s stance is on a political subject, there will be some uncomfortable truths. Unlike a Hollywood hero movie.
this is absolutely fucking terrifying
Less and less is the user’s identity belonging to the user.
This is a great example of how profiles on all of us are going to be made by governments and corporations unless we take privacy seriously.
*Have been made long ago and are being constantly updated.
Snowden already warned us about this over a DECADE ago. Their scopes and powers will have increased exponentially. And that was under ‘trustworthy’ administration. I guarantee there’s a type of system in place that flags people before they do anything, just on pattern recognition alone. Of course, they can’t use that system as a legal basis for anything, so they don’t and use parallel constructions instead.
Anyone who thinks “this is coming” hasn’t been paying attention. We’re already there and beyond.
I find the funniest shit ever is how Snowden uncovered the biggest shit show and nothing happened. Probably the starting event for me losing all hope in this pathetic species I now call Homo Merda.
I wonder if being made aware of the extensive NSA spying actually had a suppressing effect on taking action itself. It was kinda scary. Overwhelming. “Best not to think about it” kind of stuff.
That, and many just thinking it’s “to catch the terrorists” and “I’ve got nothing to hide!”
It was well over a decade ago that a store figured out a teen was pregnant. The father was livid they were advertising pregnancy stuff to her. He ate his words.
I already assumed that all project 2025 purges to date have been done with input from statistical modeling, in a way that removes far more “liberals” who might refuse orders, and retains as many MAGA/fascist bootlickers as possible.
Corporations have been already making profiles of various types for a while now in the form of adtech, social media, data brokers, people search websites, credit scores, devices and services that harvest sensitive and intimate data (e.g. mobile phone apps, watching habits from smart TVs, driving data from cars).
Our society has been set up for mass surveillance in a thousand different ways as a form of social control and dominance by those who wield power.
It’s time people realize that privacy is a right instead of normalizing abuses of consent.
Yep.
And if anyone doubts this, 15 years ago I had made a tool that created these types of profiles as a proof of concept.
I had scraped tons of subreddits, then you could pass in a user and based on both their subreddits and key words would categorize users across a few axes. That was just using naïve bayes, but worked pretty well.
The AI is just much much better at natural language processing to pull out more detailed info about patterns.
And those who read your comment, already knew. Those that SHOULD read it, never will. The same problem as with warning-labels et al.
If youre even near someone with a photo on fb and they got you in it, you already have a record and a ghost fb profile waiting for you.
Too late.
We (smart people) knew this was the end result of ai and why the far right and ccorporations love it. But holy fucking shit this is dangerous and people should be terrified of this. Stop using these platforms (I know it doesn’t matter the platform, we’re all fucked, but still)
I think it goes beyond that, stop living an online life is a better advice. Use the internet to get info, not to submit info.
Submits comment
My concern is that Reddit can sell their profiling algorithm to other companies, who then can federate with Lemmy, mastodon, etc. to build profiles against users.
It’s getting to the point where I may need to go back to cycling usernames every few years.
It’s getting to the point where I may need to go back to cycling usernames every few years.
You should definitely do that anyways, you never know when some crazy is going to try and dox you. Changing usernames won’t really protect you from advertisers though, software will link the two identities together.
On Reddit, I was doing that, but every few months. At most, a year, before the username got canned.
That’s probably a massive GDPR violation. Automated processing of extra sensitive data like political beliefs and religion is not outright forbidden but it’s subject to extra protections.
Have there been any enforcement actions against big companies yet?
Meta got a fine of over a billion euros. Google got a bunch of smaller fines, but it’s probably way above everyone else in terms of fines. Microsoft got half a billion. Even Apple got an 8 million euro fine, but that was more a tap in the wrist to make them think twice about some data collection.
And besides this, large companies are constantly in contact with the authorities and in smaller violations the general policy is to give a warning and let companies stop the illegal data processing voluntarily.
All of them are a slap on a wrist, even Meta
I’m so jealous.
Sadly you consented to all of it
GDPR prevents using underhanded tactics to assume consent for this type of use.
GDPR article 9 (1) says you can’t play algorithmic guess with people’s religion or political opinions unless you gave express permission to the service provider to do it (i.e. it’s not covered in the general GDPR boilerplate)
Hard agree with this. Does Reddit even have lawyers, or are they just using ChatGPT? Google, Meta, and Tik Tok already paid PII misuse fines for less than this. everything listed is part of the GDPR extended PII list.
Unrelated question: How do I short reddit stock?
Nah, I think all of it is literally just public data offered up by users themselves. If you didn’t want those opinions shared, you shouldn’t have posted them on Reddit.
GDPR also applies to data you get from public sources.
I don’t understand.
If someone writes a reddit post and says “I’m fasting for Ramadan,” can I not infer from that public post that the user is probably Muslim?
You cannot use an algorithm to correlate it with other data without express consent.
What counts as an algorithm? Surely it can’t be the actual definition of algorithm.
Because in most forum software (even the older stuff that predates reddit or social media) if I just click on a username, that fetches from the database every comment that the user has ever made, usually sorted in reverse chronological order. That technically fits the definition of an algorithm, and presents that user’s authored content in a manner that correlates the comments with the same user, regardless of where it originally appeared (in specific threads).
So if it generates a webpage that shows the person once made a comment in a cooking subreddit that says “I’m a Muslim and I love the halal version” next to a comment posted to a college admissions subreddit that says “I graduated from Harvard in 2019” next to a comment posted to a gardening subreddit that says “I live in Berlin,” does reddit violate the GDPR by assembling this information all in one place?
They will get your data from everywhere not just reddit. There needs to be many more laws and punishments for doing this.
Yeah this seems illegal as fuck
The title is likely inaccurate. The post only contains a summary of the user’s posting history. It makes no statements regarding the user’s beliefs.
I doubt it, since all it ostensibly does is summarize info the user has released freely. How that info is stored and retained exactly might be up for debate though.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
What does “Fuck” mean in this use case?
I know that people generally use it to express dissatisfaction or disrespect, As intensifier generally.
But Why the Fuck do we have to bring sex into degradation?
What does this serve exactly?
Am I the only one here thinking about this
Am I the only one here thinking about this
Probably.
Most insults are scatterological or sexual in nature. But you must understand that the word isn’t the thing itself. I don’t think anyone has sexual aspirations of Spez
Fuck you
Fuck off.
Am I the only one here thinking about this
Yup
Spock, is that you?
Fuck that.
Yeah; I just chalk it up to the fact that humans for thousands of years have been obsessed with sex and poop on a level more basic than language - it’s not as surprising then to think our language is riddled with allusions to it.
fuck Fuck
I always read into as a Vlad the Impaler situation. Sex is not involved whatsoever.
Good thing we’re not on reddit
How exactly is it a good thing in this particular case? All this information is only more accessible on Lemmy.
Lemmy instances aren’t summarizing their users. You can do it on ChatGPT, but Lemmy isn’t doing it.
But what’s the good thing? Yeah Lemmy might not be doing it but I can do it, and Elon can, and Zuck, and Putin and your grandmom. Whatever you post on Lemmy is as public as it can get.
The good thing is that we aren’t sucking reddit’s teat. If you are so worried, then why are you here? Why do you keep posting comments?
I’m just trying to pick your brain and figure out what exactly is good about Lemmy in this case, but you seem reluctant to give me a cohesive answer.
Lemmy doesn’t use AI to track their user base’s opinions and summarize it to mods. Is that clear enough? I’m not sure what you don’t understand.
I think their point is there’s nothing stopping Lemmy mods from using the exact same type of AI summarization tools. It may not be built-in, but many instances have their own addons for improving moderation
It’s easier to use a pseudonym on Lemmy.
Every now and then I’ve been tempted to make a Reddit account to post in some subreddits but shit like this reminds me not to fucking do it.
You wanna know how you can avoid that temptation? Get yourself a nice little permaban. Worked for me.
Just dont use Reddit already
Is Lemmy somehow invulnerable to this? Can’t it just be scraped the same way.
100% it can, and worse yet, it can be scraped and analyzed like this by Meta, or Reddit, or your nearest fascist dictator.
But that’s also pretty much the entire internet in any forum or social media platform, so although I don’t like it, I figure that’s more or less just part of using the internet.
To me it’s much like the whole “There’s no expectation of privacy in public.”
I hope it doesn’t take AI to figure out my attitudes when I regularly proclaim that there are no maga in my life more than required by various pre-existing obligation, Luigi Mangione will be remembered as a folk hero, Trump will one day be shown to be ALL through the Epstein files in all the worst ways (as will many Dems and they should all be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law), and most Democratic leadership is 100% owned by the oligarchy too, as evidenced by things such as their support of Israeli genocide and how much more urgently they are fighting Mamdani than they are Trump in many cases.
“There’s no expectation of privacy in public.”
There’s no expectation of privacy anywhere. This has all been taken way too far.
Most importantly, by using Lemmy you aren’t enriching a techno-fascist platform. They can scrape lemmy the same way they used to scrape reddit, but at least my content does not benefit a greedy little pig boy fascist fucknut.
It can, but it’s not built-in into the system and shown to every moderator in their UI.
Also your email and IP address is only available to the instance owner. So the only PII is what you share.
Nope, but at least I’m not supporting a company that actively does this.
They can even scrape likes/dislikes and make profiles for people that don’t comment.
Lemmy isn’t monolithic. They’d have to hit every instance separately. The big ones like lemmy.world are a prime target though.
