8 ms·
Training our own AI models
- brauhaus 4mo agoEvery day I'm more glad about EU legislation, that's all I have to say for now
- gobdovan 4mo agoYeah, the legislation is morally defensible on its own terms. But when you look at the full system, something funny happens: EU legislation is blocking data extraction and platform lock-in tactics that Big Tech already used to become monopolies. And since the big platforms don't have to unwind their advantages or pay back for the methods that are now restricted and considered illegal, they can peacefully extract rents from their entrenched positions for even longer, while everyone else is prevented from using the same ladder they climbed.
- vovavili 4mo ago...until you learn the rates of economic development between Europe and the US since 2008.
- Laurel1234 4mo agoEvery last single cent of that "economic development" is in the hands of billionaires, at least people in Europe have rights and their government isn't a couple of monopolies in a trenchcoat.
- vovavili 4mo agoThat is a doubly naive pair of statements.
- Laurel1234 4mo agoHow many Yankees can get treatment for say cancer without going bankrupt?
- vovavili 4mo agohttps://www.britannica.com/science/confirmation-bias https://www.britannica.com/science/confirmation-bias
- tredre3 4mo agoYes the amount of fiscal growth in America is very impressive. Yet quality of life is higher in Europe. I wonder why that is?
- tartieret 4mo agoI initially used Posthog as an alternative to Google Analytics with more privacy. Now they want to use the data for a business purpose. Working hard towards enshitification?
- sixtyj 4mo agoMost companies would bury this change in a deceptively boring T&Cs update, but we value transparency, so here's what you need to know in an internet-friendly numbered list: Users on our EU cloud instance are opted out by default So too users with agreements that prevent training (e.g. BAA, MSA, or similar) All other users on our US cloud instance are opted in by default We will anonymize all data before it's used for training We will only use data that already exists in your PostHog instance We will do all the model training ourselves, which means... We won't sell or send your data to third-party model providers You can opt out at any time via your org settings in PostHog (admin access required) Training won't start until June 29, so there's plenty of time to decide
- mark242 4mo agoIf "we will opt everyone in because otherwise we won't get enough data because we know users won't opt in" is your business model, maybe it's time for a rethink.
- rottencupcakes 4mo agoDefaults matter. Opt-in vs opt-out organ donorship has a large impact. Most people on any web app won’t stray from the defaults.
- philipwhiuk 4mo agoAgain, this is because it's uninformed. Consent matters.
- cjonas 4mo agoyea except one is a "dark pattern" to exploit customers for corporate profit while the other is to benefit society.
- mmh0000 4mo agoWhich we probably need to consider changing now that some truly bizarre and evil shit is being done on donor organs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212992
- tines 4mo ago“Opt-in by default” = opt-out?
- JimDabell 4mo ago“Opt-in by default” is an oxymoron. If it’s default then I haven’t opted into anything. It’s been enabled by default.
- deflator 4mo agoVery true. I was considering PostHog, but this sours them in my eyes. Very deceptive wording.
- skrebbel 4mo agoThey could’ve done a lot worse, and most companies would’ve.
- deflator 4mo agoThere's a helpful response. It could always be worse!
- skrebbel 4mo agoOkok what I meant was, too many companies would've hid this in a ToS update, and these guys actively market the change, and the worst crime we can accuse them of is using the wrong word for "enable". I agree that's not perfect, but I can totally imagine that if you use "opt-in" and "opt-out" a bit too much at work, esp as an analytics company deep in cookie law land, that "opted-in be default" sounds like a perfectly normal thing to say, ie I bet this is all not malice, just mild incompetence.
- xnorswap 4mo agoThis frustrates me too, if something is "opt-in", that means by default you're not included and can choose to be included. If something is "opt-out", that means you're included and can choose not to be. But then it gets used to describe the reverse, and we have to add words to clarify. I once saw a post here with a correctly described opt-in telemetry before, and the top comment here was attacking them for the reverse, thinking it was including them by default, so there's little winning, it's one of those words that has just come to mean it's opposite.
- Henchman21 4mo agoYou can’t “opt-in” to something that is the default. The choice is made for you — and when the choice is made for you? You haven’t opted in or out?
- bigstrat2003 4mo agoThis is the fastest way possible to ensure I will never do business with you, or stop doing business with you if I already am.
- slopinthebag 4mo agoPostHog better transition to an AI company soon because they are one of the SAAS's which are absolutely cooked by vibe coding. What it does is extremely amenable to LLMs and it's also non-critical for a business, making it an excellent candidate for replacement by in-house solutions. And if it means never having to use their website again that's even better. I wonder if they regret opensource, considering people will be using LLMs to replace them which have surely trained off of their code.
- frankest 4mo agoWhat a great reminder to build my own analytics and self host. PostHog just lost a customer. They could easily send a email to each customer asking if we want this. The assumption means they have no product intuition about their own customers, let alone the customers of their customers. Bye.
- xrd 4mo agoNot trying to be snarky but why not just opt out instead of vibe coding your own analytics platform? I'm uncomfortable with people using my data to train AI, but those concerns revolve around where my data goes, and whether I'm notified/aware. Posthog is giving me good answers to those questions here.
- frankest 4mo agoIt has to do with the priorities of the company and its leadership. Either they lack the basic awareness to know that training on your business customers data will likely leak their sensitive information to their competitors, or they just intend to sell that data. We are not paying to have our data stolen.
- xrd 4mo agoVery fair point!
- sedimannapoleon 4mo ago[dead]
- TZubiri 4mo agoToday I was thinking, if I start a company in the LLM tooling space, I would put in the company mission in the incorporation documents that client data will not be used to train. The temptation and the value is too great, and the opt-in opt-out consent thing ends up being a fuckery where the company tries to trick the user into allowing them to take a look into the data, presumably because they are selling the product at a loss and need an alternative revenue model. Just make it impossible from the get-go, the fine print would be that the data can be shared off-band explicitly, in an email, or if explicitly copy pasted in a support chatbox, but there would be no mechanism for us to read the data from the databases much less from the client. I don't mean it would be an air-tight mechanism like Signal or ProtonMail, if a court order would ask us to produce client info, we would still reserve the right to produce the data, but exceptionally, and definitely not for training models.
- OkayPhysicist 4mo agoMore companies need to make, for lack of a better term, "oaths" of what they won't do as a company. My pitch on it is to tie it to financial penalties the company agrees to pay, somewhere in the "enough to incentivize a significant portion of our user base to sue us" territory, such that it would be financial suicide to violate them.
- TZubiri 4mo agoContracts ad incorporations are designed for this, the issue is that the incumbent legal strategy is to use template documents, and to reduce potential disputes to 1$ in private arbitration, essentially legal's job is to make legal go away. Another term I would incorporate is a Seppuku term, if we get hacked, I resign, the company goes bankrupt. Anything else is the wrong attitude to computer security for companies that want to scale to Global reach.
- suttontom 4mo agoNot to be cynical but do you think this would matter at all? Are you saying that companies would hold themselves to their missions or even something that's legally binding? > "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one." > OpenAI being founded as a nonprofit and becoming for profit. > Didn't Anthropic literally say they wouldn't train on your data or keep it for longer than 30 days unless legally required, and then decided to opt people in to having their conversations used for training?
- jen20 4mo agoPerhaps if they hopped on a quick call for five minutes with some customers, they'd realize quite how little appetite there is for putting up with being opted into things automatically in the US but not in the EU. As an aside, this also means the EU rules are working.
- freshnode 4mo ago+1 this made me glad we opted for the EU region
- infecto 4mo agoThanks for posting. I had been in the fence for the past few months of switching. The new AI products combined with the weird UIs had been irking me for a while. This is the final nail in the coffin. Opt-in is a terrible business model imo.
- thecatapps 4mo agoAgreed. While I don't entirely care enough to rip it out of any existing products, I certainly won't be adding it to any new ones. I remember people cheering about their "OS" web redesign, which was the most confusing and unnecessary UX complication when I needed to go track down a session replay to debug something (They've since added navigation to the top right.)
- jasonmp85 4mo ago[dead]
- Ayush_Khati1 4mo ago[flagged]
- freshnode 4mo agoWhy won't companies explain what anonymisation means for them? Posthog has unfettered logged in access to some sensitive stuff. What steps are they actually taking to scrub sensitive data from my replay before being used to train a model?
- tartieret 4mo agothis is what triggered my post. The announcement pretends that it's not bug deal because of "anonymization" but that's easier said than done. You can send custom events and logs that contain confidential information even if it doesn't contain personal identifiers
- Waterluvian 4mo agoPostHog was a system we set up once, generally don't think about, and review from time to time, providing some occasional value. It was mostly harmless to leave around. But it's apparently yet one more thing we have to be actively suspicious of as it defaults towards an intolerable state. So it's easier to just rip it out of the system and move on.
- bernardom 4mo ago[flagged]
- rafael-lua 4mo agoPostHog was wonderful as an analytics solution, with its developer-first approach, good tools, and nice pricing. At this point, I lost count of how many times in the last two decades I fell for it, although I'm more used to it now. Companies that grow into success and change. With the AI frenzy, PostHog also started going all-in, and not only that, but they seem to be exploring no-coding tools and whatnot. Supabase is another one that was cool, but now it is in the AI abyss. Indeed, at this point, I'm the constant. Maybe I'm the problem here, and perhaps I should learn to accept the new AI overlords, give up and go full AI.
- kiwicopple 4mo ago> Supabase is another one that was cool, but now it is in the AI abyss. (supabase ceo) I'm curious what gives you this impression? it's true that a lot of platforms build on top of Supabase, but our focus is still just building the best Postgres platform we can (OrioleDB, Multigres, etc) admittedly we've also had to shift a lot of our tooling to things like Claude/Codex, but that's more reflective of how people are building now
- rafael-lua 4mo ago[dead]
- ASinclair 4mo agoMostly unrelated but the name of this company makes me think it's a Dick-Pics-as-a-Service provider.
- Analemma_ 4mo agoThis is totally intentional and they play it up for all it's worth on their bus ads in SF. Personally I find it just pathetic, but what can you do.
- lljk_kennedy 4mo agonetdix.com
- mrcwinn 4mo agoGross. They’ll use your product and your data to later sell a product back to you.
- xp84 4mo agoEven if there were no AI, that's not any different than any SaaS where your data gets stored. Picking at random, Optimizely certainly has a ton of interaction data available and they build new features and products that leverage your data (without which the features would be impossible). Could be reporting tools, funnel analysis, etc.
- calmbonsai 4mo agoLOL. You stay classy PostHog.
- the__alchemist 4mo agoHow much are they paying the users?
- rafael-lua 4mo agoThey are probably adding more trinkets to their shop, so you can buy them.
- rad_val 4mo agoAll of them do if you don't do something about it(e.g. migrate to self hosted solutions), trusting a ToS in 2026 is as naive as it gets.
- dzonga 4mo agoanother would be excellent product company destroyed or being destroyed slowly due to VCs and the ever chase for 'growth'
- mikkelam 4mo agoThe enshittification has begun. Time to move on!
- abustamam 4mo ago> Why this is opt out, not opt in > Put simply, because otherwise we will not have enough data to train a model that's actually useful. AKA we won't be able to make as much money if we required you to give us permission to use your data.
- gyoridavid 4mo agoI feel that the US should step up their legislation game and make sure these companies can't retroactively make rules to steal their users data. I know it's trendy to hate the EU but their legislation actually protects the users, and not the companies interests.
- thecatapps 4mo agoIt's probably very obvious by now, but there's something to be said about companies with the "SF Quirky" vibes: - The OS Redesign - "Sexy Legal Documents" - Emails with "<relevant hedgehog meme goes here>" as the subject line - Having a merch shop with action figures of your CEO It works both ways. When you're looking for adoption and making very pro-user moves, I guess it can be a benefit. However, when you're now looking to grow revenue and making very anti-user moves, it's insult to injury. I'm the last person to say that tech "shouldn't be fun" or something overly-broad like that, but if your messaging doesn't match the decisions of leadership, you're gonna have a bad time.
- rafael-lua 4mo agoIt started well, though. It was an analytics tool with a developer-oriented mind; it was refreshing compared to the competition. But all good things do seem to come to an end, especially when it is a company. They went full weirdos in the last 2 years. AI just made everything worse. Back to scanning open source projects, I guess.
- Dave_Rosenthal 4mo agoThey say, "our goal here is to improve PostHog as a product for our customers, not to expose or sell models trained on your data" but then don't actually list that as a limitation in the bulleted points. AFAICT this now gives them default permission to train an LLM on your code (as Posthog telemetry data is inextricably tied to your code) use it, and even sell it if they wanted to (as it's not your data anymore, it's their model). Yikes.
- stevoski 4mo agoI’ve been evaluating PostHog for our company. I’ve now made our decision. We won’t be using them. If they are going to position yourself as the non-slimy no-BS guys, they can’t pull this nonsense.
- 48terry 4mo ago> Why this is opt out, not opt in > Put simply, because otherwise we will not have enough data to train a model that's actually useful. Hmm, when asked to opt-in to giving their data away for yet another AI non-service, people don't want to. That's strange! The only way to get their data is to assume you can take it and force them to tell you to stop. Wonder what that could mean? Oh well, it's a mystery no one will be able to solve.
- staticautomatic 4mo agoFriendly reminder that you don't have to enable PostHog replays at all. I have a site lightly instrumented server-side with the slim bundle, and I'm still gonna double check my account settings but I'm pretty sure it's not even capable of doing the replay telemetry.
- Ozzie-D 4mo ago[flagged]
- aabhay 4mo agoThis should be a lesson in bad communication. Not being clear about whats being trained on is a huge mistake. And this announcement really puts into focus the drawbacks to PostHog’s cringe forward brand ethos
- hattermat 4mo agoposthog have lost the plot
- datagreed 4mo agoPosthog still cannot fix bugs that exist there for years and still cannot fix their identification process for merging users, but who cares right? Lets slop some AI on top of a non-working project. Good thing
- dabeeeenster 4mo ago"Training won't start until June 29, so there's plenty of time to decide" ...except, we have made the decision for all the US customers already. Nice.
- rafael-lua 4mo agoTime to scan for the current opensource copmmunity projects to migrate. Any recommendations are most welcome.
- throwatdem12311 4mo agoWe were considering Posthog and now they’re on our shitlist. Good job guys.