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Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected
(theconversation.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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I disagree with the base premise that being opt out needs to be a right. That implies that having data be harvested for companies to make profits should be the default.
We should have the right to not have our data harvested by default. Requiring companies to have an opt in process with no coercion or other methods of making people feel obligated to opt in is our right.
As the years have passed, it has become the acceptable consensus for all of your personal information, thoughts, and opinions, to become freely available to anyone, at anytime, for any reason in order for companies to profit from it.
People keep believing this is normal and companies keep taking more. Unless everyone is willing to stand firm and say enough, I only see it declining further, unfortunately.
I'm there with you, and I'd join in a protest to get it.
The death of the private life
Actually and time for data sales to be illegal. Not even opt-in.
How would that benefit the average person?
Send me your name, birthdate, web browsing history, online spending history, real time location, and a list of people you know and I will explain it to you.
By giving us the choice of whether someone else should profit by our data.
Same as I don't want someone looking over my shoulder and copying off my test answers.
What benefit do you expect from that?
Why not?
I prefer that the benefits of those things accrue to me, or to others, or to no one, in accordance with my choice.
In this way, I would decide who gains the economic or social benefits of these activities of mine; and I also, in the case of personal data, would decide who gets to make my business, their business.
Thanks for the answer.
I would maybe not go quite that far but at the very least this should apply to commercial interests and living people.
I think there are some causes where it should be acceptable to have your data usable by default, e.g. statistical analysis of health threats (think those studies about the danger of living near a coal power plant or similar things).
I disagree. Yes, there are benefits to a lot of invasions of privacy, but that doesn't make it okay. If an entity wants my information, they can ask me for it.
One potential exception is for dead people, I think it makes sense for a of information to be released on death and preventing that should be opt in by the estate/survivors, depending on the will.
But they literally can't ask you for it if it is about high volumes of data that only become useful if you have all or close to all of it like statistical analysis of rare events. It would be prohibitively expensive if you had to ask hundreds of thousands of people just to figure out that there is an increase in e.g. cancer or some lung disease near coal power plants.
They don't need most of the date, they need a statistically significant sample to have a high confidence in the result. And that's a small percentage of the total population.
And you could have something on file where you opt in to such things, just like you can opt in to being an organ donor. Maybe make it opt out if numbers are important. But it cannot be publicly available without a way to say no.
I sure hope those studies are not being done by for profit companies!
Exactly. The focus should be on data privacy, not on what technologies a service chooses to use.