Users on our EU cloud instance are opted out by default
So too users with agreements that prevent training (e.g. BAA, MSA, or similar)
All other users on our US cloud instance are opted in by default
We will anonymize all data before it's used for training
We will only use data that already exists in your PostHog instance
We will do all the model training ourselves, which means...
We won't sell or send your data to third-party model providers
You can opt out at any time via your org settings in PostHog (admin access required)
Training won't start until June 29, so there's plenty of time to decide
Opt-in vs opt-out organ donorship has a large impact.
Most people on any web app won’t stray from the defaults.
Consent matters.
The same cannot be said for some random corporation training AI models off your data to make a buck or two.
This is slimy.
1. Lobby your representatives to improve your data protection laws, even if you think it's pointless to do so
2. Stop attacking EU data protection laws, even if they inconvenience you
As can be seen from this announcement, data protection laws do make a difference.
The fact that they only opt-out EU users, because regulation forces them, tells you all you need to know about the moral compass of PostHog.
This shouldn't even require regulation, but apparently expecting companies to act morally is a bloody pipe dream. Profit over morals and concerns for your costumers, apparently.
These feels like a really bad defense. It’s great you provide transparency but I don’t want my analytics system writing my code. There are already so many other first movers that are better that I would rather connect to your analytics.
I feel like you either know that already, or should, but either way I won't be using your product anymore. Just pulled it out of the projects I'm personally in charge of and in the future I'm going to recommend against using it both internally and for clients.
Legitimately disappointed.
But then it gets used to describe the reverse, and we have to add words to clarify.
I once saw a post here with a correctly described opt-in telemetry before, and the top comment here was attacking them for the reverse, thinking it was including them by default, so there's little winning, it's one of those words that has just come to mean it's opposite.
I wonder if they regret opensource, considering people will be using LLMs to replace them which have surely trained off of their code.
And since the big platforms don't have to unwind their advantages or pay back for the methods that are now restricted and considered illegal, they can peacefully extract rents from their entrenched positions for even longer, while everyone else is prevented from using the same ladder they climbed.
The temptation and the value is too great, and the opt-in opt-out consent thing ends up being a fuckery where the company tries to trick the user into allowing them to take a look into the data, presumably because they are selling the product at a loss and need an alternative revenue model.
Just make it impossible from the get-go, the fine print would be that the data can be shared off-band explicitly, in an email, or if explicitly copy pasted in a support chatbox, but there would be no mechanism for us to read the data from the databases much less from the client.
I don't mean it would be an air-tight mechanism like Signal or ProtonMail, if a court order would ask us to produce client info, we would still reserve the right to produce the data, but exceptionally, and definitely not for training models.
As an aside, this also means the EU rules are working.
tartieret•57m ago
rvz•53m ago
This does not make any sense.
> Now they want to use the data for a business purpose.
They raised VC money and they want a return so this was predictable.
mrits•17m ago