There’s a lot of furor in this thread, but people felt the same way when Google Street View came out. Eventually they worked through most of the thorny bits and people use Street View now.
I suspect MSFT is in a similar spot. If they don’t train on more data, they’ll be left behind by Anthropic/OAI. If they do, they’ll annoy a few diehards for a while, they’ll work through the kinks, then everyone will get used to it.
Idk man… people have mostly decided they’re fine with sharing their data.
People use Google Maps even though their location is bought and sold openly. People put their deepest secrets into ChatGPT even after their CEO warned that they use it to sell you ads, keep all of it even after you delete it and may even be required to produce it during a lawsuit. People still buy new cars even though they track their movements.
What you feel is a deeply offensive ethical violation probably is fine with the general population. In general, people are willing to trade their data for good quality services.
What you're describing is "revealed preferences theory", and it requires a truly free set of choices—essentially, when looking at it in relation to companies like Google, it relies on "free market theory", the kind that only works with a spherical market in a frictionless vacuum.
People "have decided" this because they're not given good choices, they're not well-informed about what their data is going to be used for, and their real buying power has been going down for decades so they don't have the disposable funds to put toward the much more expensive options that would allow them to retain their privacy (even in the rare cases where such options still exist).
I suspect MSFT is in a similar spot. If they don’t train on more data, they’ll be left behind by Anthropic/OAI. If they do, they’ll annoy a few diehards for a while, they’ll work through the kinks, then everyone will get used to it.