> "It's clearly causing confusion for some portion of users. We recognize that the average user doesn't have a law degree," Kardwell said.
Making a mistake by stuffing their terms of use with vague boilerplate legalese which could apply to anything is one thing, not taking responsibility for that mistake and clearly stating "we made a mistake" instead just means they ended up rubbing in the stain. People are forgiving of mistakes; hubris, not so much.
As others have pointed out: that line of text was not harmless, and whether you have a law degree or not is not the issue there. It was not malicious in intent, but it was wrong and overreaching nonetheless.
We do not know if it was malicious in intent or not.
It is entirely possible that they felt that they could allow all of their private servers to be crawled by whoever was willing to pay - perhaps with terms to make it palatable (only be used for LLM weights, no human will see it, content may not be regurgitated wholesale, etc).
It could be that this change in the ToS was made to cover their backs. In fact - they may actually have already crawled all of the servers.
They claim this was not their intent. But when it comes to abusing PII that is hovered up by providers, I have been burned too often to assume a mistake.
Can you name one example where the context was not someone who was handling/processing/had the data as a part of their platform (i.e. FB) but rather a hosting provider where you've been burned assuming?
> "It's clearly causing confusion for some portion of users. We recognize that the average user doesn't have a law degree," Kardwell said.
Making a mistake by stuffing their terms of use with vague boilerplate legalese which could apply to anything is one thing, not taking responsibility for that mistake and clearly stating "we made a mistake" instead just means they ended up rubbing in the stain. People are forgiving of mistakes; hubris, not so much.
As others have pointed out: that line of text was not harmless, and whether you have a law degree or not is not the issue there. It was not malicious in intent, but it was wrong and overreaching nonetheless.