Who Owns You?
The following is a rant cut and pasted from my spewing on Blue Sky about new AI Training policy at Zoom. I shall now reproduce my rant here, so I don’t have to keep on cutting-and-pasting all over the Internet:
I’m not naive to the fact that all business now pads its nest with data scraping and selling information about its consumers to other businesses, but…
For Crying Out Loud! Now it’s not just my prefs and personal data, but my actual self that’s for sale *without my permission AND I don’t get paid!*
There’s a common legal concept that the one thing you absolutely own is yourself. (I did spend a lot of time hanging around with lawyers in my youth.)
If I do not own me, I own nothing and have no inherent rights.
If a company can unilaterally decide that the essence of another’s Self is theirs for the taking simply because I utilize their platform (for which I pay) then I am no longer mine.
Is this not the definition of slavery—to not own yourself? to have no control over your body, your thoughts, your essential being? Are we not appalled by this? We should be.
And I could go on, but I’ll stop here because I already spend too much time wibbling between rage and despair.