I 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?
Most 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
PostHog 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.
What 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.
Today 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.
Not 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?
Perhaps 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.
Thanks 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.
PostHog 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.
PostHog 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.
Why 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?
I 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.
It'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.
It 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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 61.4 ms ] threadUsers 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
I wonder if they regret opensource, considering people will be using LLMs to replace them which have surely trained off of their code.
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.
> "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?
As an aside, this also means the EU rules are working.
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.
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.
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?
They’ll use your product and your data to later sell a product back to you.
> 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.
- 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.
Back to scanning open source projects, I guess.