Instagram and Facebook have addicted users for the last 20 years, making sure to monetize us through advertisers every step of the way. Now, they’re revisiting your old posts, your special moments, and your big life updates, and using it to create billion-dollar AI tools. Zuckerberg’s braggadocious claim about Meta’s very large dataset comes shortly after The New York Times sued OpenAI over intellectual property. But Meta is pulling an old trick out of its playbook: extracting as much value out of Instagram and Facebook users as humanly possible, and totally owning your online self.
If you are not paying for some service, you and your data are almost certainly the product. It was true then, it’s still true today.
Except open source software, like Lemmy, a free service?
What do the terms of use and privacy policies say? Who’s paying for the servers and what are they getting out of it? Also, since your data is federated, what happens when it hits a server with any different policies (or who may be in violation of the license of the software itself, but is getting no enforcement)?
The servers are esupporyed by donations, mostly, but I am aware that everything I post here is very public