Note: This post is a follow up to Thursday’s discussion about WordPress(DOT COM) and Tumblr making deals to sell your content for AI programming.
Today’s article from 404 media highlights that not only is Automattic, the parent company of Tumblr and WordPress in talks to begin selling user created content (WordPress.com blogs only), but through their popular plugin Jetpack, installed on many self-hosted sites, there is a back door “firehose” that sends millions of posts to these companies already. Huge thanks to this Mastodon Post for bringing this news to light and the replies which indicate that the setting to turn this off in Jetpack is buried.
Jetpack is WordPress’s plugin which aims to do everything from social distribution of posts to statistics, contact forms, and site protection. If you’re worried about how to accomplish these things without Jetpack — CONTACT ME. This is what I love to talk about, and I’ve been blogging on numerous WordPress blogs without it. Not only can you still accomplish everything you want to do on your blog WITHOUT this plugin, but you won’t be opening up your content to being used to program AI.
I’ll be honest, when Jetback introduced a feature to have people start promoting their posts on wordpress.com through a paid ad system that looked like Facebook paid ads, I knew something smelled rotten. I knew when they were trying to monetize everything from backups to spam protection (through Askimet) that they were headed in the wrong direction.
So this doesn’t surprise me. What it does, in my opinion, is emphasize why it’s so important that we have full control over our content and our websites. Because I’m using a self-hosted platform, I can choose which plugins to use, how I want to accomplish my goals, and ensure that I’m not using something that’s going to use my data without my permission.
Again, if you have questions, please reach out. I love to chat websites and hosting and all things tech. And I want to help you ensure that you, too, have full control over your data. Comment below or use the contact link above.
