Notices by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr), page 2

AI bosses are the latest and worst offenders in a long and bloody lineage of privacy-hating tech bros. No one should ever, ever, *ever* trust them with *any* private or sensitive information. Take Sam Altman, a man whose products routinely barf up the most ghastly privacy invasions imaginable, a completely foreseeable consequence of his totally indiscriminate scraping for training data.

22/

Altman has proposed that conversations with chatbots should be protected with a new kind of "privilege" akin to attorney-client privilege and related forms, such as doctor-patient and confessor-penitent privilege:

https://venturebeat.com/ai/sam-altman-calls-for-ai-privilege-as-openai-clarifies-court-order-to-retain-temporary-and-deleted-chatgpt-sessions/

I'm all for adding new privacy protections for the things we key or speak into information-retrieval services of all types.

23.

But Altman is (deliberately) omitting a key aspect of all forms of privilege: they immediately vanish the *instant* a third party is brought into the conversation. The things you tell your lawyer *are* priviiliged, unless you discuss them with anyone else, in which case, the privilege disappears.

And of course, all of Altman's products harvest all of our information.

24/

Altman is the untrusted third party in every conversation everyone has with one of his chatbots. He is the eternal Carol, forever eavesdropping on Alice and Bob:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob

Altman isn't proposing that *chatbots* acquire a privilege, in other words - he's proposing that *he* should acquire this privilege. That he (and he alone) should be able to mine your queries for new training data and other surveillance bounties.

25/

Back in 2006, AOL tried something incredibly bold and even more incredibly *stupid*: they dumped a data-set of 20,000,000 "anonymized" search queries from 650,000 users (yes, AOL had a search engine - there used to be *lots* of search engines!):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/19/privacy-breach-by-design#bringing-home-the-beacon

1/

Good to see that @Mastodon has hit pause on the new ToS and are going to revisit the offending clauses.

https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/114709820512537821

@oscarfalcon

I think that's premature - in the Github discussion, Eugen says that the lawyers they used were unfamiliar with this kind of community-oriented project. It's not too late to amend the ToS, and I am reasonably certain that this represents a misstep, not a deliberate attempt to foist bad terms on Mastodon users. I think we should expect that Eugen and the org will do the right thing here.

@funcrunch @Gargron Probably not, though nothing's impossible. I've also reached out to @mmasnick to see about getting the arbitration clause in the Bluesky ToS (which I didn't know about until just now) removed.

@funcrunch @Gargron @mmasnick

Here's the "binding arbitration" tag on my blog:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/binding-arbitration/

And since mastodon.social is the flagship instance, which sets the moral example - and the workaday template - for most instances in the Fediverse, this catastrophically bad clause is likely to proliferate far and wide throughout the Fediverse, rendering most of this new, better internet unfit for use.

Please, @Gargron, reconsider this. It is a very bad look - and worse still, it's a very, very bad example.

@Gargron Also, I saw your note on the Github issue about using pro-bono counsel. If you'd like me to ask EFF's lawyers about helping Mastodon come up with fair and user-rights-preserving ToS, please email me at cory@eff.org

I am trying not to be dramatic here, but this is a deal-breaker for me - literally. I changed dentists because I wouldn't sign binding arbitration. I changed solar installers because I wouldn't sign binding arbitration.

I could never, in good conscience, recommend that someone use a service that required binding arbitration as a condition of use - which means that as of July 1, I would no longer be able to recommend that people get an account on mastodon.social.

In reading a fascinating and important discussion of the lack of a termination clause in the new Mastodon.social Terms of Service:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/35086

I was GOBSMACKED to discover the new ToS has a "binding arbitration waiver," which takes away your right to sue, no matter how badly the service abuses you.

These are profoundly unethical, terrible clauses. They should never, ever appear in "adhesion contracts" (that is, contracts that you merely click through, rather than negotiating.)

No one, and I do mean NO ONE, should ever, ever, EVER agree to a binding arbitration waiver.

These are the most grotesquely unfair contractual terms in routine use today. The potential for abuse is literally unlimited.

Remember when a Disney World visitor died of an allergic reaction after being assured that her food order was allergen-free? Disney argued that her family couldn't sue because her husband had clicked through an arbitration waiver when signing up for a free trial of Disney Plus.

I am very shocked to see this in the ToS for the flagship Mastodon instance, promulgated by the Mastodon nonprofit.

To be clear, I think this is *much* worse than, say, requiring users of mastodon.social to agree to have their posts used to train LLMs. The harms of having your work fed to an AI are mostly hypothetical and relate to moral qualms.

By contrast, a binding arbitration waiver would literally allow the management of mastodon.social to cause your DEATH and face no consequences.

Rand Paul, a "#Libertarian", on being disinvited from the President's cake party:
"This is an outrage!"

Rand Paul, a "Libertarian," on Trump sending people to an offshore slave labor camp for life: "..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0MbR4uHPho

Check out this video from about 1:15 on, as a brass band play the leftist anthem "Bella Ciao" to drown out #ProudBoy neo-Nazis who showed up at a #NoKings rally in Atlanta yesterday. Not only is it incredibly heartening, but the band SLAPS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhBaJpzAR2k

ETA: A Tumblr user identified the band, "The Black Sheep Ensemble":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr3zqlA1uhk

Signs of #NoKings #Hollywood

If there's anything that illustrated the hollowness of the Democratic Party as an effective opposition for me, it's this.

Yesterday, I watched a video of a sitting US Senator being thrown to the ground and cuffed by fed goons for asking questions of the fed official he has direct oversight authority over.

Within minutes, I'd gotten DOZENS of texts from Dems and Dem orgs asking for $5-$50 to "fight fascism."

That's it. "Are you terrified that your country is slipping into fascism? Pay me."

Fun fact about proving your citizenship!

My kid was naturalized along with my wife (her mother) a couple years ago. My kid is still a minor, and cannot apply for a certificate of naturalization until she turns 18, and then it's anyone's guess how long the DOGE-neutered State Dept will take to issue her piece of paper.

In other words, you can be naturalized as an infant and have no way to prove it until well after your 18th birthday.