Oddbean new post about login | logout Given that Nostr data is all public, is it likely that a data collection and/or data analytics company will mine it? It is certainly possible that a Nostr client could do this in the future, perhaps by running an indexing or caching service to organize the data and sell it to advertising agencies. In my opinion, this is likely to happen eventually. Thoughts?
Pretty sure that’s what the scum bags at primal are doing.
Oh. This wasn't about Primal. Though they could be. So could nostr.wine, nostr.band, and NostrPlebs via noswhere.com. Anyone that indexes data could do this. Maybe we need a data policy to say that we're not. 🤔
I think it's already happening
Most likely. I don't see why not. It's free.
I think it’s possible and I have questioned that already in a chat with a friend.
Cambridge Analytica likes this.
If the clients are open source, we will find out and choose to continue using the service or find another client. I love the fact there are no ads and would happily part with some sats to continue my ad free nostr experience.
Right. But I was just mentioning a client as a possible funding model for them. It doesn't even have to be a client. It could just be someone that connects to all the relays and downloads all events. We may not even know they exist!
Yeah I could see it, currently there’s way “richer” data sets for advertisers in normie-land though.
Agree. Our data may not be that important yet, but one day the tide may turn. Well, I guess their demographics could be to target freedom loving people 🤔
I suppose they're already using it for feeding language models. Would be sad if not lol.
Good point. Blocked by Twitter for language model training? Why not give Nostr a try! It's free!
It's probably a bit futile... But would a short terms and condition in profile help? I'm not a lawyer but something like Creative Commons license? Just to mess with big Corp scrapers?
Client devs and relay operators could add this, but it kind of does go against the whole open model that we value so dearly.
No doubt. All the more reason for client devs that care about freedom to give users choice, transparency, and control over any algorithmic content feeds, as those kinds of feeds are obvious ways for advertisers to utilize user data and manipulate (aka, censor) what content is in them. I don’t think we should expect that they won’t. I think we should be ready for when they do it so that the user has the tools in place to be in control.
Absolutely. If Nostr goes down the P2P path or gift wrapped messages path, then it would severely hurt any data model.
Probability very high. AI scraping as well
The AI will want to end up buying Bitcoin afterwards 🤣
So even with a new #nostr address and perfect IP anonymity one could cross reference my Twitter posts with my Google emails and former nostr posts and link my new posts to me by the style of writing. And if the authority does not like what I wrote jail me for 15 years. Yes inevitable
If you use the same handle for everything, don't use a VPN, then yes, it can and will be done.
@jb55 What about changing profiles in #damus?
Absolutely. Its to be expected that in Nostr-as-public-square your data is public and can be correlated with other identities. Public data is fair game for any actor large or small to work with. What isn't is your behavior when working inside the client. The advantage for traditional apps is to record your scrolling habits with respect to the content you are subjected to and identify what effects your attention. Client developers future and present make the decision to add it in or not.
Nostr is like a dream for advertisers: portable web identity with a baked in unique user ID and even more nuanced training data thanks to zaps and custom reactions.
i like everything here is in public . I believe everyone could indeed sell what he wants to companies. i hope people start understand it has value ?
I bookmarked this project https://asami.club/ nostr:nevent1qqsvumjhaq22nqxpk32mf9k7n8hayks7g0emghe4altax84vf5jys6qtzfzdh 🙂
nobody can stop -> free market manipulation -> bitcoin derivatives / shadow of bitcoin -> nostr macro data collection hidden / private relays cannot be extracted certain admin of major relays block such bots/api or give away at a price leave it to openworld forces - nostriches will not use such relays once they know its data harvesting or opt out for paid/free relays who dnot do that. protocol is so far full proof certain user give their data for freebie others willnot or use multiple npubs
This is what I'm most concerned about using Nostr. Privacy is the option to reveal your other identities to the world. I have chosen not to and fuck whoever tries to change that. Fuck whoever tries to correlate my Nostr behaviour to my other identities. And if I ever see a single embedded ad on my Nostr feed I will stop using that client immediately. Nostr is the last stand of humane social media. Client devs have the responsibility to defend that. I have spoken.
How about zapvertising?
V4V is what zaps are for, no? Announcing new useful things will get you zaps. This is true especially for the announcements regarding the client itself. The bigger the client is user-wise the more zaps the dev(s) will get for new announcements. There is no need for external ad revenues.
Assuming culture of zapping + culture of ensuring reach for dev posts, relatively unplutocratic economic distribution, and a large enough market share.
Yes, and I think those are fair assumptions to make. Culture of zapping is already present. Reach for dev posts is natural given the status and the power to change the UX (this happens on every platform, people are interested what the top dogs have to say). And if by large enough market share you mean a decent percentage of users related to X and other centralised platforms, then I would say there's some work to do but we'll get there! 🚀
Good point on devs changing ux... I meant that every unassuming private non-social non-marketing expert dev who is willing to forward release notes to nostr shall have a team of loyal beacons.
Yeah and when we ship GitNestr the devs can get zaps directly for their code instead of release notes. That's the goal at least.
What I mean is advertisers zap their prospects with ads. Pay the prospects directly instead of paying the platform, because there is no platform. Nostr users get paid, and they or their client pays for premium relays.
Oh, I see. The Brave browser model but with bitcoin instead of shitcoins. I don't know how I feel about that but it could work.
Is that how BAT works? I never cared to look. I see it as totally organic though. Zap someone and you can be sure you got their attention. And this could onboard noobs to bitcoin without them having to go exchange some fiat somewhere where the shitcoin scammers are waiting for fresh meat
Not exactly but it's a similar idea if I remember correctly. But I think I would mute zapverstisers too depending on how it would actually work. Being blasted with zads every time you interact with a note would be a big no for me.
The genius of big tech was understanding that marketing departments have the biggest budget and capturing that. It's just the way the world works. That money should be captured by users instead of platforms. Sure, block the zapvertisements but get paid by the zaps regardless.
Would you be willing for a premium subscription using sats? Lets be honest, open data and no company would manipulate that? Companies would pay dollars for this data. so clients are gonna show ads to keep building their projects especially small to medium ones. Large ones shall do it as well for profits ofcourse but thats how it goes.
Sure, sats for relays if need be. But no, if a client starts showing ads to keep building then it's time to build a new client without ads.
That's why I keep my long form writing out of Nostr. I don't want it to be used as a free training data for some Big Tech product.
The question is not about nostr, if it's public it will eventually be exploited
If a person/ company is determined enough, there is probably no way to prevent scraping of public data. But it's unlikely that there's AI company that is so much determined to scrape and use just my specific content. After all, I'm just a small, rather anonymous content creator. There's a chance, that AI bot will come to my site and stop at checking robots.txt. However, when the data is stored in public relay, that's different story. I have no control over it and it's just included in big dataset, freely available.
It 100% will. This has nothing to do with nostr and everything to do with publicly accessible data. Remember information yearns to be free Use privacy tools for sensitive data, and learn how to use different pubkeys for your different online personas
Agree. Privacy tools helps. All relays know who you are. VPNs help.
Nostranalytics!
This is inevitable, and I think it may actually turn out to be a huge strength of nostr
How so? "Free data! Come get our data!"?
A strength in the sense that other platforms erecting barriers to their data precludes them from acting as a true "town square", leaving that niche open for something like nostr. I expect we'll see an eventual bifurcation of the social landscape into purer, separate implementations of both the private and public spheres, with many hidden invite-only groups on one hand, and on the other hand a single public global context (hopefully nostr). Like AI is going to scape everything that's not totally private/encrypted anyway and so if there's something that isn't strictly private that's probably because you're intending to publish it, so why not maximize its reach?
The data’s in, 4 out of 5 nyms like sunny D!
The data itself has no value because it's all public/free anyway. But those who can best collect, organize and process it can sell the results of that processing for a very profitable amount. For instance, a relay can label npubs by marketing interest and sell access, not to the data, but to the labels themselves. Same for content classification for kids (pay to keep your kids safe), health metrics for insurances, etc. Super standard data pitch for VCs. nostr:nevent1qqsvumjhaq22nqxpk32mf9k7n8hayks7g0emghe4altax84vf5jys6qppamhxue69uhkztnwdaejumr0dspzq0mhp4ja8fmy48zuk5p6uy37vtk8tx9dqdwcxm32sy8nsaa8gkeyqvzqqqqqqyd7jtnt
I’m sure they will if the sample size is large enough to make it worthwhile. I’m also sure it will be scraped for AI learning as well. Best not to put too much personally identifying information anywhere online really.
For sure, and one of my concerns
So I've been thinking about this.. what about edit? Can relays refuse an edit? That may solve the delete thing..
We don't really have edit. We have delete, but it's only as good as the relays that honor a delete.
just use pastebin if you want edit and delete
Pastebin, the modern social network.
It'll. I think the cool thing here is that data won't be restricted to big data brokers that makes trillion out of exploiting your emotional subconscious. Anyone that want to train a model can do so, in a permission lesson manner. As aways, never post online things you don't want to be seen by others. This is true for anything online though.
This is by design, same as with bitcoin, and IMHO is key to the network's growth and adoption. And also same as bitcoin, it's perfectly possible to build privacy solutions on top of the network to prevent excessive dragnet surveillance and data mining. Some of this work is already in progress with wrapped objects, peer-to-peer delivery, relay syncing etc but a lot more remains to be first imagined, then built and deployed. Everything in its own time. Before PGP messages on pastebins, you need reliable pastebins.
I assumed this was part of the goal with Primal’s caching service. Looking at the data they are collecting, it looks like they are making those plans.
Yes definitely, and the companies will use the same line that zuck uses: "We don't sell people's data" And then they will sell access to info based on your data, analytics on your data, recommendations on your data, they will sell everything about your data except your data itself so they can say they don't sell your data. The only defense against this is to not publish what doesn't need to be published, nostr is more public than other networks so there needs to be more awareness of this.
Definitely, they need to find more data in order to keep improving their language models. I think they also started to use transcripts from YouTube videos as training data. Will be hard to fight against it, but I do feel they get some backfire from creators. I think bookwriters started a lawsuit and many will follow. So will be interesting to see how that will evolve.
Inevitable. It's a personal responsibility matter that is scary for most, even most of us. (And there's a reasonable argument to victimhood until commonly understood). Modern reality: Actions are not private without the premeditation or intervention of a security expert, and then only by degree of confidence. Options oversimplified: Strategic preference falsification - Socially destructive, personally destructive, potentially ineffective, unethical. Radical transparency - Freeing, helpful to others, allows one to own one's own inadequacies. Provably secure communications channels accessible to 80 IQ 4 year olds: Necessary for the future of human health
I consider everything I post on social media as something public that can be hoarded ✌️😎
nostr:note1eeh906q54xqvrdz4kjtdax006fdpuslnk30ntm7h6v02cnfyfp5qp2c34l It's good that we're addressing the elephant in the room. Instead of a handful of organizations having access to our behavioral data, everyone in the world has it. Advertisers are the least of our concern. We are a very inconvenient subculture for many oppressive regimes intent on defending currency coercion rather than embracing monetary volunteerism. Our data could easily be used to create aggregate behavioral models to inform repressive strategies. That's the black pill I've been choking down for months now. BUT... Life counts most when it is lived out loud. This is our opportunity to make our presence known with cryptographic proof that there were many of us who were on the right side of history. Nostr is the first sovereign settlement in cyber space. We have a boundless and borderless territory. We have voluntarily chosen money. We have culture. We have passionate builders and contributors. Afaic, the job is to build Zion for the awakened. The asleep have FB, Insta, X, YouTube, MSM, etc. If you want to be surrounded by them, go there. That's what they're into. But today this frontier is ours. It is purposeful. And any who find value in what it has to offer are welcome. To me, the size of the population is less important than the passion each of us brings. I'd take any one of you over 100 normies. 💜 That's me though. Hike your own hike, frens. 👣
We know you exist.
Policy complete. 🤝
With public data, do you even need consent?
Is all data public? Don’t relays have non public info?
They have encrypted data, that really can't be mined and be of much use.
Is all data public? Don’t relays have non public info?
They have encrypted data, that really can't be mined and be of much use.
They have encrypted data, that really can't be mined and be of much use.
We won't pursue this, but I'd see indexing as a win for discoverability, which NOSTR sucks at currently. Also, what is the business model for clients? Advertising already has product market fit with Twitter which has been the design model for most clients. Idealists, meet capitalism.
Yes, especially if nostr's use cases do proliferate. nostr:nevent1qqs9zu5wr85a2xhmnqsvddc3qp0xuwmj0lr0l057anl7vsvp5g608hcpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq3xamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7tpvfkx2tn0wfnszxmhwden5te0vd58y6tnw3cxjmrv9ehx7um5wgcjucm0d5q3yamnwvaz7tm0venxx6rpd9hzuur4vgq3samnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwdehhxamgv4ex2tnrdaksz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ekk7um5wgh8qatzqyt8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnwdaehgu3wvfskueqpzfmhxue69uhhqatjwpkx2urpvuhx2ucprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuumwdae8gtnnda3kjctvqyg8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2u55nr9