News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5!. Parent comment

Re:Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5! by pastor_williams on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @12:08PM (#48572470)
It isn't just out of the kindness of their hearts that they don't do this. There are laws and regulations. There is also legal risk and reputation. I have to go through a legal and privacy process at my big corp job whenever I want to record a new timestamp and I need to ensure that the data is used appropriately and that it is wiped later. I've only seen these compliance requirements become more onerous over the past ten years and I expect that to continue.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5! by Terr_ on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @12:24PM (#48572720)
> There are laws and regulations. There is also legal risk and reputation.

One of the big companies, Meta, already decided to go ahead and grab terabytes of pirated books to feed their LLM. [0]

Therefore I would not give them (or similar entities) the benefit of the doubt when it comes to how they might use text that customers "gave" them under some unreadably-favorable terms of service.

With PII, the pirated-books example is doubly-relevant, because the accusation of "this output is reproducing my copyright work" is very similar to "this output is revealing my private data". The fuzzy black-box nature of the algorithms offers ways to stymie enforcement, arguing that victims or regulators cannot conclusively prove a chain of cause with zero coincidences.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5! by kyle-rb on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @03:23PM (#48575476)
Is the reputational risk of pirating terabytes of books worse than the reputational risk of shredding (destructively scanning) millions of books?

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5! by Terr_ on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @07:51PM (#48578650)
> Is the reputational risk of pirating [worse than] destructively scanning

Yes, actually: The blame or bad-reputation for that waste goes to US copyright law and its inanities.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5! by yallpendantools on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @09:34PM (#48579452)
Huh? Anthropic bought the books it seems. They acquired the books fair and square. They ripped up their own books; I may hold that to be sacrilege but those aren't my books. They're not even library books. They're Anthropic's books. Why should I care if they burn the books they've legally acquired? They don't even seem to be rare or coveted copies. I'm just happy for the secondhand booksellers who made bank from the transaction.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5! by pastor_williams on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @12:48PM (#48573067)
Fair enough. I don't use Facebook at all because I don't respect or trust the company or it's mission. I do use Gemini and Claude though.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5! by subscribed on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @03:45PM (#48575830)
Google is an ad company, I'd be very.... cautious with the trust here.

https://apnews.com/article/google-smartphone-surveillance-ve...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5! by dylan604 on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @01:03PM (#48573266)
Why? What has Google or Anthropic done that suggests they are trust worthy? Google is infamous for not not being evil. It's not like either asked for permission to access copyrighted material either. Not one tech company deserves trust. They all should be treated as suspect. I don't expect anyone to trust anything I make for the simple reason I don't trust anything anyone else makes.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5! by gowld on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @12:41PM (#48572977)
More specifically, the CEO said that users are "dumb f*cks" for submitting data to Facebook, the predecessor of Meta.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5! by gmerc on Thursday June 18, 2026 @01:05AM (#48581045)
“Rule of law”. About that…, come November.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5! by latentsea on Thursday June 18, 2026 @04:21AM (#48582408)
> There are laws and regulations

Those worked very for Uber.

[ Parent | on HN ]