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I agree that the privatisation of the USPS would be a very bad thing. However the language you’re using, esp, in the second point, is optimised to be alarmist at the expense of being accurate. You aren’t doing anybody any favours by being intellectually dishonest.

Is it a closed dataset, or are they selling it to other companies? Your language evokes privacy concerns. I’m sure you know that, and I’m sure that that’s intentional. Using someone’s handwriting as training data for OCR, as part of a training dataset significantly large enough to be used as training data in the first place, does not pose a material additional privacy concern.



> Using someone’s handwriting as training data for OCR, as part of a training dataset significantly large enough to be used as training data in the first place, does not pose a material additional privacy concern.

USPS literally processes people's private addresses. I'm amazed how you can say "Does not pose privacy concern" with a straight face when the entirety of the past decade has shown us that if there's private data, companies will abuse it, sell it, leak it etc.


does not pose a material additional privacy concern.

But it does. It so very much does, because it always does. Always. Every time.

Data gets anonymized, then other firms de-anonymize. Co-mingled anonymized, too.

And once the MBAs see it, it will be pried away, and sold, and processed, and snarfed, with hooks during training too.

Because it always happens. Always. Every time. It's like candy to a child, like food to a starving man.

At this point, we are insane to think data stored or even observed, is not being monetized against us.

So the parent's post is not alarmist, because it always, always happens.




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