Privacy browser extensions misled users and sold 8 million AI chat logs, exposing sensitive conversations for profit without consent.

Urban VPN is a particularly bad offender. It intercepts all your conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI bots (glad I don’t use any), and sends them to the VPN vendor for resale. This is nuts.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    If the price is free, you are the product

    This is anti-Free Software propaganda. Some things really are free without catches, and we shouldn’t impugn them just because other things are fraudulent.

    • MotoAsh@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      FOSS in most cases is very different than merely using a canned product someone else is “selling”.

      Precisely within machine learning, which is this topic, it’s the difference between running models locally and just using claude. There is a VERY big difference and a VERY different price for entry.

    • tiramichu@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      The catchphrase doesn’t mean you should be wary of free software, it means you should be wary of free services.

      “If a service costs you no money to use, and yet costs the operator money to provide, you should think carefully about how the operator is financing it, because it may be via capture and sale of your data, or other undesirable means”

      Yikes, that would be a mouthful.

      So yeah, amazing and benevolent free software does exist, but there’s a reason FOSS and self-hosted are often said in the same breath. Giving away software for free costs nothing (aside from the generosity of the developer’s time) but hosting things costs money and that’s why if a service is free you should exercise suspicion.

      Also, shoutout to our Lemmy Admins as proof that this rule isn’t always true, and for hosting the fediverse for free out of their own pockets, simply because it’s a cause they believe in.