If you feed somebody's posts into your shitty LLM without an explicit and reversible opt-in, you are violating the consent of fedi users.
This "Zeitgeist" app not only violates consent, but it also doesn't have a centralized ActivityPub identity that can be blocked or defederated.
The creator is making pretty clear that it's designed this way to make it harder to block.
Normally, you'd expect an LLM scraper to have a single (blockable) ActivityPub account doing the scraping.
This is designed so that everybody who uses the service has their identities harvested to steal people's data on the app's behalf.
Taking the block-evasion one step further, according to the thread the service doesn't set a user agent so it's not possible to block that way.
Again, according to the thread it does specify an ActivityPub client named "Zeigeist".
Would appreciate any feedback from admins about how to block a specific ActivityPub client.
The service also does not currently respect any of the various opt-outs to indexing that people use.
Which means it ignores some pretty universal web standards about consent for indexing.
Even if your excuse is that you're a little baby who doesn't know anything, you should know that.
So far it seems like there's no way (short of a lawsuit) to block this completely.
Instance admins can (and should) do web server hacks to block their own users from logging into the app.
@fedilore we just reject requests with redirect_uri back to zeitgeist. This prevents them from registering their app
https://mastodon.pnpde.social/@spielleitung/116296598330620006
Attached: 1 image Wir blockieren die App von zeitgeist.blue. Das bedeutet, dass kein Account auf pnpde.social die App nutzen kann. Das bedeutet leider nicht, dass eure Postings nicht über andere Server von der App gelesen werden können. Absichtlich kein Link. Es geht um eine Software, die die letzten 24 Stunden der Timeline eines Accounts in eine LLM liest, um daraus eine Zusammenfassung zu generieren. Technisch simpel: Wir rejecten Requests mit entsprechendem redirect_uri-Parameter in nginx: #MastoAdmin
@fedilore Alt text: screenshot of Mastodon conversation:
Jan Lehnardt @[email protected] Mar 15
@seldo how can I make sure my posts are never used by this app to be sent to an LLM vendor?
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Laurie Voss @seldo @janl You would need to block me from following you, I suppose.
Jan Lehnardt @[email protected] @seldo you personally or some app account?
(Note that this kind of stuff is not well liked here on mastodon, I got browbeaten into shutting down just a search engine that worked that way, let alone exfiltrate a timeline into an LLM provider)
Laurie Voss @seldo
@jan Me personally, and also anyone who uses the app. It's just a mastodon client, fetching the timeline. It looks like every other mastodon client.
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