But it's apparently yet one more thing we have to be actively suspicious of as it defaults towards an intolerable state. So it's easier to just rip it out of the system and move on.

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

AFAICT this now gives them default permission to train an LLM on your code (as Posthog telemetry data is inextricably tied to your code) use it, and even sell it if they wanted to (as it's not your data anymore, it's their model). Yikes.

Posthog has unfettered logged in access to some sensitive stuff. What steps are they actually taking to scrub sensitive data from my replay before being used to train a model?

> Put simply, because otherwise we will not have enough data to train a model that's actually useful.

AKA we won't be able to make as much money if we required you to give us permission to use your data.

- The OS Redesign

- "Sexy Legal Documents"

- Emails with "<relevant hedgehog meme goes here>" as the subject line

- Having a merch shop with action figures of your CEO

It works both ways. When you're looking for adoption and making very pro-user moves, I guess it can be a benefit. However, when you're now looking to grow revenue and making very anti-user moves, it's insult to injury.

I'm the last person to say that tech "shouldn't be fun" or something overly-broad like that, but if your messaging doesn't match the decisions of leadership, you're gonna have a bad time.

They’ll use your product and your data to later sell a product back to you.

I’ve now made our decision. We won’t be using them.

If they are going to position yourself as the non-slimy no-BS guys, they can’t pull this nonsense.

As an aside, this also means the EU rules are working.

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.

I wonder if they regret opensource, considering people will be using LLMs to replace them which have surely trained off of their code.