209
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36063172
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
209 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
74247 readers
5257 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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
I always read into as a Vlad the Impaler situation. Sex is not involved whatsoever.
fuck Fuck
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)
Let this be a reminder to anyone with an account with over a thousand comments: time for a new one.
Facebook can figure out all of this about you just from what you like and what links you click. Now imagine what a fucking goldmine a few years of your post history is to a deep learning algorithm – let alone someone who’s been using the same Reddit account for two decades. I bet they know those people better than they know themselves.
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.
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.
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?
They will get your data from everywhere not just reddit. There needs to be many more laws and punishments for doing this.
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.
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.
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.
*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 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.
Too late.
And those who read your comment, already knew. Those that SHOULD read it, never will. The same problem as with warning-labels et al.
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.
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.
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 are 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.
Since anyone can create their own subreddit and become a mod there, does this mean that anyone can look at these profiles?
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.
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.
“There’s no expectation of privacy in public.”
There's no expectation of privacy anywhere. This has all been taken way too far.
Nope, but at least I’m not supporting a company that actively does this.
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'm sure it's as accurate and expensive as most A.I. slop.
What’s that utility that helps you delete your profile the right way?
Powerdeletesuite?
How do I get an AI summary of my old account?
view more: next ›