Pluralistic: Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed (19 Jun 2025)
Today's links Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed: Zuck thinks we've all forgotten about Beacon. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2015, 2020 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed (permalink) 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 The AOL dump was a catastrophe. In an eyeblink, many of the users in the dataset were de-anonymized. The dump revealed personal, intimate and compromising facts about the lives of AOL search users. The AOL dump is notable for many reasons, not least because it jumpstarted the academic and technical discourse about the limits of "de-identifying" datasets by stripping out personally identifying information prior to releasing them for use by business partners, researchers, or the general public. It turns out that de-identification is fucking hard. Just a couple of datapoints associated with an "anonymous" identifier can be sufficient to de-anonymize the user in question: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1508081113 But firms stubbornly refuse to learn this lesson. They would love it if they could "safely" sell the data they suck up from our everyday activities, so they declare that they can safely do so, and sell giant data-sets, and then bam, the next thing you know, a federal judge's porn-browsing habits are published for all the world to see: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/01/data-browsing-habits-brokers Indeed, it appears that there may be no way to truly de-identify a data-set: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/understanding-the-maths-is-crucial-for-protecting-privacy Which is a serious bummer, given the potential insights to be gleaned from, say, population-scale health records: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/health/data-privacy-protection.html It's clear that de-identification is not fit for purpose when it comes to these data-sets: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/precautionary.pdf But that doesn't mean there's no safe way to data-mine large data-sets. "Trusted research environments" (TREs) can allow researchers to run queries against multiple sensitive databases without ever seeing a copy of the data, and good procedural vetting as to the research questions processed by TREs can protect the privacy of the people in the data: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership But companies are perennially willing to trade your privacy for a glitzy new product launch. Amazingly, the people who run these companies and design their products seem to have no clue as to how their users use those products. Take Strava, a fitness app that dumped maps of where its users went for runs and revealed a bunch of secret military bases: https://gizmodo.com/fitness-apps-anonymized-data-dump-accidentally-reveals-1822506098 Or Venmo, which, by default, let anyone see what payments you've sent and received (researchers have a field day just filtering the Venmo firehose for emojis associated with drug buys like "pills" and "little trees"): https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/technology/personaltech/venmo-privacy-oversharing.html Then there was the time that Etsy decided that it would publish a feed of everything you bought, never once considering that maybe the users buying gigantic handmade dildos shaped like lovecraftian tentacles might not want to advertise their purchase history: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/etsy-users-irked-after-buyers-purchases-exposed-to-the-world/ But the most persistent, egregious and consequential sinner here is Facebook (naturally). In 2007, Facebook opted its 20,000,000 users into a new system called "Beacon" that published a public feed of every page you looked at on sites that partnered with Facebook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon Facebook didn't just publish this – they also lied about it. Then they admitted it and promised to stop, but that was also a lie. They ended up paying $9.5m to settle a lawsuit brought by some of their users, and created a "Digital Trust Foundation" which they funded with another $6.5m. Mark Zuckerberg published a solemn apology and promised that he'd learned his lesson. Apparently, Zuck is a slow learner. Depending on which "submit" button you click, Meta's AI chatbot publishes a feed of all the prompts you feed it: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/the-meta-ai-app-is-a-privacy-disaster/ Users are clearly hitting this button without understanding that this means that their intimate, compromising queries are being published in a public feed. Techcrunch's Amanda Silberling trawled the feed and found: "An audio recording of a man in a Southern accent asking, 'Hey, Meta, why do some farts stink more than other farts?'" "people ask[ing] for help with tax evasion" "[whether family members would be arrested for their proximity to white-collar crimes" "how to write a character reference letter for an employee facing legal troubles, with that person’s first and last name included." While the security researcher Rachel Tobac found "people’s home addresses and sensitive court details, among other private information": https://twitter.com/racheltobac/status/1933006223109959820 There's no warning about the privacy settings for your AI prompts, and if you use Meta's AI to log in to Meta services like Instagram, it publishes your Instagram search queries as well, including "big booty women." As Silberling writes, the only saving grace here is that almost no one is using Meta's AI app. The company has only racked up a paltry 6.5m downloads, across its ~3 billion users, after spending tens of billions of dollars developing the app and its underlying technology. The AI bubble is overdue for a pop: https://www.wheresyoured.at/measures/ When it does, it will leave behind some kind of residue – cheaper, spin-out, standalone models that will perform many useful functions: https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/ Those standalone models were released as toys by the companies pumping tens of billions into the unsustainable "foundation models," who bet that – despite the worst unit economics of any technology in living memory – these tools would someday become economically viable, capturing a winner-take-all market with trillions of upside. That bet remains a longshot, but the littler "toy" models are beating everyone's expectations by wide margins, with no end in sight: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00259-0 I can easily believe that one enduring use-case for chatbots is as a kind of enhanced diary-cum-therapist. Journalling is a well-regarded therapeutic tactic: https://www.charliehealth.com/post/cbt-journaling And the invention of chatbots was instantly followed by ardent fans who found that the benefits of writing out their thoughts were magnified by even primitive responses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect Which shouldn't surprise us. After all, divination tools, from the I Ching to tarot to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies deck have been with us for thousands of years: even random responses can make us better thinkers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies I make daily, extensive use of my own weird form of random divination: https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/ The use of chatbots as therapists is not without its risks. Chatbots can – and do – lead vulnerable people into extensive, dangerous, delusional, life-destroying ratholes: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/ But that's a (disturbing and tragic) minority. A journal that responds to your thoughts with bland, probing prompts would doubtless help many people with their own private reflections. The keyword here, though, is private. Zuckerberg's insatiable, all-annihilating drive to expose our private activities as an attention-harvesting spectacle is poisoning the well, and he's far from alone. The entire AI chatbot sector is so surveillance-crazed that anyone who uses an AI chatbot as a therapist needs their head examined: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc 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. 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. 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 privileged, 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. 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. This is like when Zuckerberg directed his lawyers to destroy NYU's "Ad Observer" project, which scraped Facebook to track the spread of paid political misinformation. Zuckerberg denied that this was being done to evade accountability, insisting (with a miraculously straight face) that it was in service to protecting Facebook users' (nonexistent) privacy: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck We get it, Sam and Zuck – you love privacy. We just wish you'd share. (Image: Japanexperterna.se, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Connectivity is a Lifeline, Not a Luxury: Telecom Blackouts in Gaza Threaten Lives and Digital Rights https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/connectivity-lifeline-not-luxury-telecom-blackouts-gaza-threaten-lives-and-digital Creative Commons 4.0 has arrived on Flickr! https://blog.flickr.net/en/2025/06/18/creative-commons-4-0-has-arrived-on-flickr/ LA Law Enforcement Agencies Rioted So Hard They Ended Up Shooting Each Other https://www.techdirt.com/2025/06/16/la-law-enforcement-agencies-rioted-so-hard-they-ended-up-shooting-each-other/ “The Clandestina,” a fantasy novel by Jasmina Tesanovic https://bruces.medium.com/the-clandestina-a-fantasy-novel-by-jasmina-tesanovic-part-one-af51d5c73cb7 Kagi for Libraries https://kagi.com/libraries Object permanence (permalink) #10yrsago What’s in the Pope’s barn-storming environmental message? https://www.wired.com/2015/06/popes-memo-climate-change-mind-blower/ #5yrsago Microsoft criticizes Apple's monopolism https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#honi-soit-qui-mal-y-pense #5yrsago Austerity in disrepute https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#breadlines-r-us #5yrsago Avia, c'est mort https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#avia #5yrsago Trump's covid "test-tubes" are contaminated miniature soda bottles https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#art-of-the-deal #5yrsago Trump wants to dismantle the OTF https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#save-otf Upcoming appearances (permalink) PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 Tualatin Public Library, Jun 22: https://www.tualatinoregon.gov/library/author-talk-cory-doctorow London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16 https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Recent appearances (permalink) FediForum Keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_Gs1t0qe78 Science Fiction is EXPOSING Scams and AI Dystopia (Bad Faith) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlrKlp_Iiko The Rideshare Guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKeoCxJWVVE Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud) A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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