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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thought/ Pre Crime.
Crime by statistical association
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 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 you
Fuck off.
Spock, is that you?
I always read into as a Vlad the Impaler situation. Sex is not involved whatsoever.
fuck Fuck
Also known as profiling.
That’s a useless summary that describes 99% of reddit and lemmy users
So Reddit is the scumbag steve.
this is absolutely fucking terrifying
No wonder I got banned.
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?
It’ll be interesting to see if there’s an increase in slop or poisoned data to deliberately throw this tool off. Could be a fun experiment.
Less and less is the user’s identity belonging to the user.
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.
Since anyone can create their own subreddit and become a mod there, does this mean that anyone can look at these profiles?
