I’ve seen a couple links to this post on 404 Media that Automattic may sell user data to AI companies. We’ll see how it shakes out, but just in case anyone is worried about Micro.blog: our terms of service make it clear that users own their data, not us. We put this in to avoid any conflicts.
Brandon @manton A good reminder that if something is free there is a pretty dang good chance that you (and your data) is the product.
Whether it’s ad data, AI training or something else - try to stay on top of the pieces others want to sell of you.
James Manes If this goes through I’m deleting my 10 year old tumblr account. Sad times.
David Enzel Automatiic does everything it can to profit from Wordpress. It seems lucrative. But I think it’s sad since there are so many other places to host WordPress. As for Tumblr I guess they bought it with the intent of turning a profit. It’s not easy to protect your data.
Manton Reece @abc Yeah, Tumblr is clearly not going as well as Automattic hoped, as they've recently had to move employees away from working on Tumblr. It's so expensive to run, it might be better as a smaller product, not sure.
Matt Freeman Because of Automattic's decision and www.supporthuman.cx/25feb24-r... I moved my stuff off of WP.com today and into Micro.blog. Thanks for looking out for the users!
Lou Plummer I swear, Automattic better respect user privacy when it comes to the Day One journaling app they bought. I've got 10+ years of pretty private stuff in mine!
Manton Reece @amerpie I'm not personally worried about Day One. Privacy is so central to the app and syncing, I would be shocked if they even consider touching it. But similar decisions with WordPress and Tumblr do risk eroding their credibility, which is too bad.
Angelo Stavrow @amerpie also, Day One data is end-to-end encrypted so I’m not even sure how they could sell that data for training purposes. 🤔
Though I’m not sure if it’s encrypted by default, so I guess that’s a whole other thing.
Terence @manton.org Thank you for clarifying this very important point for me. If Automattic were to continue down this path, not only would I be very disappointed, but I think I would definitely move away from Wordpress, Tumblr and all their products.
