Inches & Miles

The AI era seems to be emboldening startups to once again take bold swings and use your data without even bothering to ask so they can build a startup around it.It’s the great truism of the internet: You give an inch, and folks will take a mile.Back when I was running ShortFormBlog in 2009, I remember trying a number of digital startups, all of which promised different ways to help monetize my content through optimization or some clever feature that made my site 5% better. These scripts were mostly horrible, with the exception of Apture, humane tech advocate Tristan Harris’ startup. I eventually got rid of most of them as I quickly realized what they were doing. But most of them had an underlying goal: They wanted my audience’s data.The most notable example of this was Facebook’s Like button, perhaps the most infamous bait-and-switch conducted by the company before the pivot to video. The company convinced websites large and small to put a little code on their page in exchange for a…