But following media reports, it has also admitted that China-based employees had access to US users’ data, although the company insisted it was under strict and highly limited circumstances.

Employees of ByteDance might be Chinese, but they don’t work for the government. They work for ByteDance. I haven’t found anyone claiming to have proof that data in US citizens has left the company. Just fears that it could.

There is concern that ByteDance may be giving the Chinese government access to data on US citizens. It’s worth noting that no proof of this actually happening has surfaced.

Mostly because of this. TikTok is the app collecting massive amounts of data on its users with dubious intent and questionable security that is currently being scapegoated, and discord is on the long list of popular apps that collect massive amounts of data their users with dubious intent and questionable security that we are not scapegoating.

Don’t ruin your own experience because someone else is enjoying it differently than you like to

Oh, no, that wasn’t excusing Meta in general. Just giving them a pass on that they’ve had, to my knowledge, a history of respecting robots.txt, which makes this piece of software better than outright malware. Starting it secretly and not giving site hosts a chance to make sure they had their privacy configured the way they liked first was a shady as hell move, no argument there.

I think of this as a problem with opt-in only systems. Think of how sites ask you to opt in to allow tracking cookies every goddamn time a page loads. A rule based system which lets you opt in and opt out, like robots.txt, to let you opt out of cookie requests and tell all sites to fuck would be great. @aniki@lemm.ee is complaining about malicious instances of crawlers that ignore those rules (assuming they’re right and that the rules are set up correctly), and lumping that malware with software made by established corporations. However, Meta and other big tech companies haven’t historically had a problem with ignoring configurations like robots.txt. They have had an issue with using the data they scrape in ways that are different than what they claimed they would, or scraping data from a site that does not allow scraping by coming at it via a URL on a page that it legitimately scraped, but that’s not the kind of shenanigans this article is about, as meta is being pretty upfront about what they’re doing with the data. At least after they announced it existed.

An opt-in only solution would just lead to a world where all hosts were being constantly bombarded with requests to opt in. My major take away from how meta handled this is that you should configure any site you own to disallow any action from bots you don’t recognize. As much as reddit can fuck off, I don’t disagree with their move to change their configuration to:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

I know what you’re trying to say, but that phrasing though. Being able to opt out is an important part of consent. No means no, man.

But meta’s will, and Alta Vista. I’m not angry at them when a script kitty makes a bad crawler

I guess I don’t really see the problem with that though. There are configuration levers you could be pulling, but those sites you’re hosting are not. There are lots of shady questions about how these models are getting training data, but crawlers have a well defined opt out mechanism.

The web would not be what we know it as without them, because it’s how you find sites. Why shouldn’t Alta Vista have one? I don’t object to what Alta Vista does with the data.

Have you used a search engine? Crawlers are not generative AI.

Does that mean this new bot is ignoring sites’ robots.txt files? The Internet works because of web crawlers, and I’m not sure how this one is different

Edited to add: Apparently one would need to add Meta-ExternalAgent to their robots file unless they had a wildcard rule, so this isn’t as widely blocked by virtue of being new. Letting it run for a few months before letting anyone know it exists is kinda shady.

Please, be reasonable:

return post.Contains("Twitter") || post.Contains("elon") ?  "loser" : "cool"; 

This mindset requires a silver bullet solution to class problems before the conversation about race can start. The practical effect of this is that ideas that would make the world piecemeal better for people of color (any people of color, not just blacks) are deemed not worthy of consideration.

Similarly, because we’re talking about this argument being used to silence non-white voices, that means that there is an assumption that any pro worker solution to class problems that is dreamt up must be inherently better for people of color. Without listening to anyone who might tell you otherwise. It gets very White Man’s Burden-y.

Basically, there’re two ways to interpret the idea that race problems are class problems:

1. They’re the same, so if we only focus on one, that’ll solve the other
2. They’re the same, so if we focus on both, that’ll solve the one real problem.

The former excludes voices, and you should be mindful that it furthers the divide that those in power want. The latter is inclusive, and allows for multiple fronts against “The guy at the top”

I think your metaphor is a little more apt than you think: The complaint is that because white people are uncomfortable with talking about race, they will insist that fixing the big hole will somehow also fix the smaller hole, and therefore there’s no reason to acknowledge the small hole.

Yes, I think the point they’re getting at is that people will use the concept of uniting regardless of race as an excuse to ignore the voices of people of color. Especially because that’s a go-to argument for white people to cop out of racial conversations that make them uncomfortable. I’m tempted to believe there’s some of that sentiment in the lurkers of this thread, given what’s getting down voted.

But it would make the rich richer, which makes it a good bet. I think the only thing that would stop private companies being allowed to develop beachfront property in the strip is if it were to turn out to be less profitable.

But that’s true of all governments that aren’t really looking out for their people.

Oh, that sounds serious, what’s Ligma?

When grooming is life

I know this is what-about-ism but I really wish we cared half as much about Meta having already destabilized the last two presidential elections.

You don’t know what to do with the three seashells?