Also known as profiling.
Thought/ Pre Crime.
Crime by statistical association
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.
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 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!”
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.
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.
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.
No wonder I got banned.
That’s a useless summary that describes 99% of reddit and lemmy users
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
this is absolutely fucking terrifying
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 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?
GDPR prevents using underhanded tactics to assume consent for this type of use.
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.
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.
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
Am I the only one here thinking about this
Yup
Fuck you
Fuck off.
Fuck that.
Spock, is that you?
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.
I always read into as a Vlad the Impaler situation. Sex is not involved whatsoever.
fuck Fuck
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.
It’s easier to use a pseudonym 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
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.
The screenshot shows an llm summary of a users posting history. Is that what you mean by “determine belief values stance and more” ? Is there more to this? How is that summary different from scrolling through someone’s posting history to see what they post about?
It’s made by a machine and can be biased by its prompt, training, and owners political beliefs (see Elon’s Grok).
The post title makes it sound like Reddit is doing some sort of automated classification of user politics with some sort of ml technique. But the screenshot does not show that. It shows an llm summary of a users posting history . If the tool was run on a user that posted exclusively to a cat subreddit, the summary would have been about how the user likes cats. Despite the utility or accuracy of llm summaries, what the screenshot shows is far more anodyne than what this post’s title implies is happening.
How is that summary different from scrolling through someone’s posting history to see what they post about?
How is reading the Clif notes/summary different from reading the book? Time and effort taken, as well as a much shallower understanding of the material (assuming your summary is even relatively accurate).
It’s an easy way to get an instant opinion of someone so you can make a determination on whether you like it without having to tax your poor brain into actually thinking, and you can let something decide your opinion before you even know what you want to know. A summary provided by a product that is notoriously frequently wrong or lies and makes shit up out of whole cloth.
