#Meta used back-to-school photos of #schoolgirls, some as young as 13, to #advertise #Threads to a 37-year-old man. The images, posted by parents on Instagram, were used without their knowledge or consent. Parents and campaigners criticised the move as #exploitative and #potentiallyharmful to the #children’s #onlinesafety. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/20/parents-outraged-meta-uses-photos-schoolgirls-ads-man?eicker.news #tech #media #news
Parents outraged as Meta uses photos of schoolgirls in ads targeting man

Exclusive: Instagram pictures of girls as young as 13 were posted to promote Threads site ‘as bait’, campaigner says

The Guardian

Fortunately, #PaydayLoans are de-facto #illegal in #Germany because they not only violate expectable terms and conditions but essentially are what's called "#Sachwucher" or "effective extortive terms" and require a desperate, "inexperienced or otherwise not able to consent informed" individual, which makes said deals #exploitative and thus a felony, because #ConsumerProtection is something that exists in the #EU in general!

#USpol #Finance #PaydayLoan #LoanSharks #Billionaires #AndressenHorrowitz #LarryEllison #Enshittification #WorkingPoor #AntisocialSystem #Employment #Precariat #Insecurity #USA #US

Billionaires Found a New Way to Steal Your Paycheck

YouTube
Huge Telegram Group Where Men Traded Non-Consensual Photos of Chinese Women is Exposed

Telegram is technically banned in China.

PetaPixel

@mjdxp it'll not only harm #TEMU, but hopefully #SHEIN as well since "#FastFashion" is at best #exploitative if not "#waste from the factory"...

But given #Tariffs imunder the #TrumpRegime will make everything more exensive, this won't reduce #ConsumerDebt as with #CreditCards, but merely skyrocket them to new, fightingly huge heights...

Invisible TikTok Workers' Exploitative Conditions

TikTok, the social media giant whose consumers are rapidly growing, relies on a vast, largely invisible workforce. Behind the joy and entertainment are workers - content moderators, engineers, outsourced staff - facing long hours, psychological strain, low pay and a lack of rights. But TikTok wor

Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

@rightardia
That's not a new issue. The poisonous concept of "good" and "bad" minorities and immigrants has been around for a long time.

#racist #Divisive #exploitative don't begin to say enough about the evils of that framing.

political violence in America

Salon.com

I just realized that a lot of the same people complaining about #AI were the same people that were complaining about #Uber.

Uber is not your friend, but the #taxi companies also weren't your friend.

AI is not your friend, but #ContentMills are also not your friend.

What you are is an #ignorant #technophobe, not even able to be elevated to #luddite.

#Luddites knew exactly how their machines worked, and broke them because the machines weren't working for them.

The critique of Uber was stanning for #exploitative #Rentier #Capitalist who'd already so thoroughly engaged in #RegulatoryCapture that their #monopoly had become part of the background.

@samhenrigold I think both are key:

Just like a lot of #US Services have already been unavailable for refusing to comply with laws (i.e. #CashApp & #Venmo don't comply with #KYC & #AML) and a lot of things are banned in the #USA under the veil of "#ConsumerProtection (i.e. #KinderSurprise, unwashed eggs & non-chlorinated chicken despite being scientifically better) ...

https://youtu.be/wVYG1mu8Lg8

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Everything we do is being used to feed AI models. From the way we write our blog posts, to the pictures we take, and even the way we talk to each other. Everything is being hoovered up, and being turned into a model. 

The result of this is that if we share content to websites we have to see whether they have an AI learning clause. Usually these clauses are opt out rather than opt in. If you are not attentive your content will be hoovered up, and eventually regurgitated by AI.

The problem isn’t that AI models are being fed. The problem is that AI models are being fed without our consent, and without us benefiting from what we have personally contributed.

I’m writing about it today because of [this article](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/stack-overflow-users-sabotage-their-posts-after-openai-deal/). It makes sense for us to remove our content from such sites. Not only was Eyeem bought by a company that wants to use photos to teach an AI model but it wants to charge users for using the site that will expoit their intellectual property. The same is true of WordPress. You will pay for these features and we will ingest your content into our model and then we will monetise it.

They’re being paid twice. First by the people they’re abusing, and a second time by the people who want to use AI generated content. We can opt out, but we’re at a stage where we would have to opt out of being online. Every site is training AI models on us.

## The Case For Self-Hosting

I would have written this post earlier but I had broken Linux yet again and had to migrate from the install I damaged to a tidy one. In the process I was able to migrate Immich from one card to the next using grsync.

I am improving. In the past if something broke I would have just started from scratch. This time I copied some files from one card to the other, and I migrated other data using grsync.

The most reliable of feeding “our own” AI models is to self-host on Immich, Nextcloud and Photoprism just to use three examples.

We could even two lighter instances of LLMs but that’s more geeky and more involved. With Immich, Nextcloud and Photoprism we can keep doing things the habitual way.

## And Finally.

If Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and others gave back to their community members, rather than to shareholders there would be less of a backlash. As I have said since 2006 or 2007, online communities have value because of their users, and users should get something back from those that want to monetise the communities.

At the time I said “think of ROI for the users, not just PR firms and investors”. Two decades later the same problem is still around.

https://www.main-vision.com/richard/blog/feeding-ai-via-communities/

#AI #artificialIntelligence #exploitative #machineTraining

Feeding AI via Communities

Everything we do is being used to feed AI models. From the way we write our blog posts, to the pictures we take, and even the way we talk to each other. Everything is being hoovered up, and being t…

Richard's blog