Maven, a new social network backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, found itself in a controversy today when it imported a huge amount of posts and profiles from the Fediverse, and then ran AI analysis to alter the content.
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To be honest, the extreme negative reaction was a surprise to me, as I thought interaction between disparate systems was the entire point, but clearly we didn’t navigate the culture correctly.
Noooo fucking shit? If they spent more than a minute on a proper instance and not
milquetoastmastodon dot social, they would have realised that a good number of fedi users despise shenanigans like this?Hmmm it was even able to pull in private DMs.
Maybe private DMs on Mastadon aren’t as private as everyone thinks… that, or the open nature of Activity Pub is leaking them somehow?
Edit - From the article:
Even more shocking is the revelation that somehow, even private DMs from Mastodon were mirrored on their public site and searchable. How this is even possible is beyond me, as DM’s are ostensibly only between two parties, and the message itself was sent from two hackers.town users.
From what @delirious_owl@discuss.online mentioned below, it sounds like this shouldn’t be very shocking at all.
The shocking part was less about Maven’s methods or lack of ethics, and more along the lines of “How the fuck did they do that?!”
What @delirious_owl@discuss.online seemed to be implying is that direct messages on Mastodon should be considered “public” rather than “private”.
I’m assuming that’s along the same lines of how Lemmy users generally think that their upvotes/downvotes are private when in reality, if you know how to look for them, you can see them.
I don’t think we should expect privacy from either. Instead, we need better documentation.
Personally, I’d appreciate to see a public dashboard displaying everyone’s DMs and upvotes would help.
