You better understand the move to open source office tools when you read about Techbros and demented presidents in action.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
312 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
88823 readers
3717 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 3 years ago
MODERATORS
The interesting wrinkle is that this is effectively a consent laundering scheme. Individual users can't meaningfully opt out of AI training across the ecosystem, and now business accounts 'consent' on behalf of every visitor whose data passes through their sites. The website operator agrees to terms covering content they don't solely own — comments, bylines, photos of third parties.
Legally the news organizations are in a bind that's worth watching: block Meta's crawler and lose distribution, or allow it and hand over training data to a company building the models that flatten their traffic. The Nieman Lab angle makes sense — for publishers this is choosing between two slow bleeds.
Now are they talking about these companies Facebook business profiles that some companies use as their "website " or they talking about going to your actual www.incertnamehere.com allows them to scrim it?
I heard they're releasing a new brand logo too:
Whoever still uses meta or twitter has no one to complain to about their own fault.
Damm. Sorry dumping some rant, my work forces us to use whatsapp, so far my chat is a bunch of numbers didnt give access to contacts. Most of the time idk who is talking to me. I have two pixels with graphene os, 1 for work and my personal. And vpn always on. Also i disable the javascript in Ironfox, ublock chilling in extensions. At this rate im about to euthanize the fam network and block all meta related incoming and outgoin.
Keep enshitifying, Meta, keep going.
Of course I can say that having mindfully avoided Meta apps for years. Some people are stuck on them because it's what their boss uses.
Stop using meta products
i haven't even started using that as a company name.. it's stupid. google's new 'parent' name, too.
Easier said than done when all your friends and family use WhatsApp and Instagram
I sent everyone a message, roughly "hey I'm moving away from Meta products. From now on you can contact me through SMS or Signal." All the important ones followed me to Signal, not all, but enough. The rest are using SMS or calling, some have stopped contacting completely. Which is sad, sure. But I look at it as they don't think I'm important enough for them to spend 30 seconds installing Signal or using a SMS that is already available for them. So I assume they don't like me very much, which is fine. I don't think about them too much either.
That's the same issue everyone has/had, including me. You'd be surprised how alright it works to use SMS and phone calls once you get used to it. It's honestly refreshing. You don't have to go that far, necessarily, as there are other messaging services out there that I'm sure your circles find better than SMS.
Sure, you might miss out on some events and stuff due to others needing to remember that you're no longer on Meta platforms, but just be a little persistent and they'll remember to include you, just like they did me ;-)
I said the same thing then took the plunge a year or so ago. Now the people that I used to keep up with on FB text and interact directly with me more often even than FB and I enjoy it more.. Also don't have to incidentally see all the assholes in the process.
True, but someone has to start.
Just write them letters
Have you checked the price of stamps lately? In the US, they are $0.82 now. You should use a carrier pigeon instead. You can even use IPoAC to send an e-mail by pigeon.
Me and my box full of forever stamps I don't use.
The USPS has gone to shit. I used to order packages, first class, every 3 weeks or so. For my entire life it took 2-3 days, until idk 2018 it crept upwards, by 2021 it was more like 3-5 days, 2025 or so it crept up to 7 or more days.
It's on purpose obviously. The USPS is mandated in the constitution too, but they want to get rid of it anyway, and the dems haven't done shit to restore it, and yes I know of their performatively throwing money at them during biden's term, which changed nothing.
If the Republicans do get rid of USPS, some (probably red) rural areas will discover they no longer get shipments of any kind. Only USPS is mandated to ship to all far-reaching locations in the US, and commercial services hand their parcels over when delivering the last mile is not profitable.
All my friends and family know how to contact me because their my friends and family.
Nah, works fine. Sure, you won't get a nudge every 15 minutes but that's (surprisingly to some) totally okay. Just quit, there's other ways to keep contact with the people you care about.
As if they weren't going to scrape the data anyways.
Businesses can't exactly ignore or control where the customer are.
True, but customers also go to where businesses are. People are feeling pressured to use these services by businesses that only have a presence there.
Hey, everybody! This guy just solved the network effect problem! Wow! Never thought I'd live to see it!
That is not true at all lol, unless you're already well established, and only a very small group of people are being pressured to use a service they don't have an account on(me included). If you're just starting, or just about to expand your customer base online(in the way that make sense to the type of your business), going to where the customer are is the only choice. You can totally have multiple platform but that also not making people shift platform, people just won't bother with you if you're not on the platform they frequently use.
Also, as a customer, i'm definitely won't bother to create an account on Meta just so i can interact with the businesses(whatsapp is the sole exception), but if i were to start a business i'll have to went out of my way to find customer, which is whenever they are.
Also, as a customer, I’m definitely won’t bother to create an account on Meta just so i can interact with the businesses(whatsapp is the sole exception)
Sometimes you are pressured by your peers:
- "This business has this thing/event on FB/WA/IG, lets all sign in using the app and go. Cmon just make an account don't be like that"
- "Look at this promotion/raffle/party/event, we could participate, we just need to add a like/repost/whatever on this page."
Businesses also bring people in:
- "To participate in this campaign or have access to this discount, you must like/repost/whatever on our FB/IG page."
- "To book the room/court/machine/etc, please reach us out using Whatsapp, or join our Whatsapp community"
And many other scenarios.
Over the years I saw countless examples of this. A business presence brings people in to the closed platform, and you get pushed out of social circles and activities because you aren't a customer of Meta.
It's mostly due to positive feedback loop, Meta build their userbase then bring in businesses which bring in user which then bring in businesses, it's been going on for so long that there's no way a small business can ignore that userbase, especially when Facebook know where in general each of the user live so ads can be location based. The fact we're here is because we're the outlier, not the norm.
Your comment is being scraped by meta rn btw
Isn't all of lemmy scraped by AI data crawlers? (They should call them Data Trawlers, after the ocean going monstrosities that drag those massive nets that scrape the bottom and take everything out of the sea.)
For funsies, I once asked Claude about some obscure software I was reading about in a Lemmy post that was about an hour old. Its reply referenced a different post in the same comment thread of the Lemmy post I was already reading.
We should all assume so and also assume that our pseudonymity is transparent.
Others have told me on multiple threads, people with credibility as far as I was concerned, that we already know they do, and there is no way to stop it due to the nature of federated social media. Although all the corporate social media can't seem to stop the crawlers either.
Corporate social media can try to put a stop to it; federated social media provides an effortless protocol to scrape everything, including even who voted how on what
The updated terms explicitly state that Meta can use the content it collects from associated websites to “train” Meta products. Elsewhere in its terms of service, the company defines “AI at Meta” as one of those products.
I would have assumed they were already doing that.
Reminds me of why I quit WhatsApp, they started requiring uploading your entire phone address book and I wasn't willing to allow that.
GrapheneOS solves this with contact scopes, but yea just leave it uninstalled if you don't need it
They probably were, but now it's (questionably) legal!
Fuck meta.
i dont use facebook or instagram BUT I have to rely on Whatsapp. My workplace uses it, my family uses it, my friends use it....etc.
Meta can use web scrapers to crawl and collect content from websites “associated with” business accounts on its platforms, according to its new commercial terms of use.
Not valid here (means, it does not really give them that permission), and they could get sued if they used such t&c here.
They seem to not mind being sued. For them it's just a fee that they calculate into their expenses
Perhaps but it still makes the clause pointless.
They seem to not mind being sued
Oh, I didn't mean it because of money, but the court could specifically order them to not use such clauses in T&Cs anymore.
(And then, in case of disrespecting court orders, that would hurt them financially so much that they'd think more than twice)
But until then, and until it has gone through several courts and eventually settle, they can harvest all they want
In fact, it will be lived practice by then and not really enforced. Is how they operate.
You can scrape and collect any public facing content currently.
What are their IP addresses again?