[soulofmischief]

I vividly remember consenting to all variety of terms agreements as a 13-year old on the web in 2007. I also remember explicitly licensing all of my output as CC and embracing copyleft. It's never been a secret that even captchas contribute to the improvement of models designed to ultimately sell ads to eyeballs.

A lot of people just were not paying attention to the game being played, and so now they're getting played themselves.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

When a company hides their skeevy practices in 30-page social media term consent form, I blame them a lot more than the normal person with limited time or the literal child. I’d prefer such people didn’t “get played” by multinational corporations, even if they potentially could have prevented it.

[soulofmischief]

I think it's important to understand that consent was indeed given, and most users likely understood that they did not own any non-copyrightable portion of their user-generated content.

Rather, the conversation should focus on how to improve parsing of ToS (I personally believe we should use symbolic labeling like we do with food), as well as regulation around what terms can change for content which was generated under the premise of an older ToS.

OP's statement, "It's immediately and self-evidently obvious that no end-user in 2007 consented to photos of their 2007 era teenage self being used to train an AI how to identify an emo kid," is simply false. Many, if not most users, understood that they gave permission for their UGC to be used to improve the services. This is what I am rebuking.