[amelius]

> Seems like if it's legal for a person to do it should be legal for software to do for the most part.

It's legal for me to look out of the window and watch my neighbor go to the supermarket.

It's _not_ legal for me to build an automated surveillance system that tracks everybody on the street 24×7 and stores everything into a large database.

[hbn]

I'd say this is more like if someone automated taking pictures of every flyer and missing pet poster people put up on a lightpole and saved it to a database.

There's more deliberate action when you post something on a public online form than just existing in a place outside of your house. Especially considering you've always had the option to use reddit anonymously anyway.

[samstave]

>use reddit anon....

Read, yes - post no.

And - you can no longer create an account that is not tied to an email...

[hbn]

OpenAI didn't have access to every poster's email when they crawled reddit. If you're making posts or have an account name that are easily tied back to your personal identity, that's on you. But you could make an account with any random username you wanted, that keeps you anonymous as far as OpenAI is concerned.

[samstave]

My point was only that 17 years ago - and for more than a decade, reddit required no email address as a requisite to create an account... so it was truly anon... then they tie all (new) accounts to emails now - which makes it a trivial click for survelleince to ID your reddit account...