Besides all the damage control Automattic is trying to do about selling user data to openAi and Midjourney, I don't think they realize how much they have jumped the shark for some of us.

See, I worked for the company for a long time. I was really proud of being part of Automattic: For years, there was a clear push to be 'the odd silicon valley company', one that actually respected user privacy, gets its money from the users themselves and not from stealing their privacy, etc.

When Automattic bought tumblr, I remember Matt saying on an interview that his plan was to try to show the world that there was a different way to do social media, one that was not based in selling user personal data: he wanted tumblr to be funded by its own users. I remember actually defending him in tumblr itself: People was skeptical, but my reply to them was always that even if I not always agreed with Matt in everything, believed he was really serious about protecting user privacy (even if it was only to protect his own reputation of being, somehow, a champion of the open internet).

Well.

Now this has been proved as bullshit. Automattic signed a deal with the two more prominent AI companies to sell user data, and didn't announce it until the first data delivery was already done. What's worse, if you read the announcement they posted, it's clear they intended to gaslight the userbase: They talk about a new profile setting to protect your blog from AI scrappers. They are trying to sell it as an extra layer of protection against data scrappers, when they know very well that they only think they can do to prevent that is politely request the scrappers to not take this or that blog data (spoilers: AI companies couldn't care less about those requests). And of course, what is worse: at no moment it's mentioned that Automattic has reached an agreement with the people behind those scrappers to proactively send the data on their own, without even needing to scrape the web to get it. In exchange for (what I assume) is a hefty amount of money.

Not only Automattic has sold your data behind your back, but on top of that, they are trying to gaslight you about it.

The AI data selling is a punch in the gut. It's horrifying, but at least it's not surprising: Matt Mullenweg has been hyper-bullish about AI since last year, so he probably doesn't even see this is a the huge betrayal of user trust that it is. But the way they intended to communicate it to the end-user, the sneaky, shady way to talk about it in the official posts... that feels like an entire battering.

For me, the trust is absolutely broken. I can't trust automattic more than I trust Meta: Yeah, there's this 'don't share my data with AI thieves' checkbox in tumblr and WordPress now, but they haven't even communicated clearly what the 404 media article is telling us: That the data is already in OpenAi hands, and that the only thing the toggle does is kindly requesting them to not use the data they already have from your blog. And that they are not even contractually obliged to comply.

Even if they actually comply and don't use that data, I can't trust Automattic to not change their approach and remove that checkbox in the future (It's not the first time I see the company doing these kind of changes, but I always lied myself thinking that in the end it was minor issues with less impact than the overall stance of the company). I can't trust Automattic to not start doing these kind of things behind our backs (since they have clearly tried to do it this time and got caught only because some brave soul leaked an internal doc to 404 media).

How could I trust Automattic anymore, when they even tried to keep which kind of data they were selling to OpenAI in secret from its own engineering team? I feel terrible for my ex-coworkers still in Automattic, because I know a big share of them are mortified and aghast for everything that has happened in the past week. But it's their job and they are powerless against greedy and evil executives ('evil' as in "couldn't care less about the users or their employees")

When I was laid off last summer, the reason I got from HR was that 'I wasn't aligned with the direction the company needed to take'. And holy shit, wasn't that true.

As I said, I can't trust Automattic more than I trust Facebook, Google, or Twitter. And it breaks my heart and I can't believe I've just wrote that.