Selling user data to artificial intelligence companies is simply mass surveillance under a new guise. People are rightfully worried about governmental mass surveillance. Yet most people are blithely unaware of the surveillance they sign up to when opening an account with a Web 2.0 company.Recently, we are all being forced to sign new “terms of service.” What most people don’t know is that these contracts allow their raw data to be sold to train AI models.
A safer situation for everyone would be if AI companies trained only on publicly available data where the creator of the data gave consent, which only can be meaningful if the user controls their data. The entire idea of Web3 was that users – not platforms – would own and control their data, even if, like a Reddit post, it is meant to be public. Ownership could be cryptographically inscribed in a decentralized blockchain so that no single platform could sell your data without your permission.