The only difference between students doing it then and professionals doing it now is the students had no positive, glaring reason to mistrust.
You really think a throwaway quote when Zuckerberg was a college student applies nowadays?
You really think Meta would risk getting a massive (losing) lawsuit on their hands, in exchange for what? Middling amounts of training data?
you can pay whatever they want, they will train and use your data, I figured this is not something that should be discussed but obviously I have been mistaken...
If you are being serious, then you have a wildly distorted view of the world. No organisation can routinely break all of their contractual obligations. If you think Meta are doing this then you are not seeing Meta, you are seeing a fictional bogeyman.
The fact that Facebook has so much experience taking advantage of people's private data is one of the reasons I believe them when they say they won't be doing it when you pay them for that service.
To me, their history suggests that they know more than most about how to get away with breaking both the spirit and the letter of the rules, and that they are motivated to enrich themselves without regard for what rules are broken.
I would not know which to expect, spirit or letter, in any given instance.
However, even if they were to surprise me by being perfectly meticulous about the letter of the rules from now on, I have so little trust in them that I would expect some technicality somewhere in the language of the contract.
Honestly, I wish the tech community would do a better job identifying the actual individuals who are making these decisions instead of associating them with the brand they're under at the moment, because it's not THAT many people. Like, if you look at only the 100 tech sector companies included in the $NDXT index, how many individuals hold a VP or above title there, and how difficult would it be to trace key decisions at different times made at different companies to the individuals holding those positions there plus board membership and major shareholder identities (with the caveat of known unknowns here) and make a sort of ethical index and trace that along their careers with company moves, promotions, board appointments, shareholder decisions, etc? Go a step further and link that to financial performance and I'm sure folks at quant firms are already ten steps ahead of where I'm going with this, but I care less about profiting off of this data and more about surfacing it to show that it's people and more specifically, specific individuals driving these decisions.
We're also beginning to accept requests for zero data retention. Contact Meta sales to request this.
Let's have two pricing levels. One will be 12.5x more expensive than the other. For the cheaper one, we will get their express permission to train models on their inputs. For the more expensive one, we will still treat their data EXACTLY the same, but we'll lie to them and say that we won't. I've checked in with legal and they raised their sherry glasses and toasted "Gentlemen, TO CRIME".
There's contractual cover, there are lawyers all over the USA ready to make themselves very rich by creating a class action over it... you don't have to worry! Or, you do, but frankly, only MI6/CIA/Mossad can save you now.
Easy to comprehend: Trust lost is hard to gain.
Though, it is extremely competitive of Meta to sell Muse Spark (Grok 4.5 / Qwen 3.8 Max level model) cheaper than DeepSeek v4 Flash / MiMo v2.5 / GPT 5.6 Luna, regardless.
We can make this fun, within 18 months from now, there will be some story / whistleblower like "a inadvertent defect was found that allowed your 'private' data to be used in our training endeavours, we sincerely apologize and have already addressed the issue" - if this does not happened in this timeframe I will donate $1k to a charity of your choice.