Why would a row be more than one pin? That's not how computering works.
And yeah, when you give a company license to do whatever they want with your data, "whatever they want" includes AI.
I mean, fuck Pinterest, but this isn't news.
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
61 points (88.6% liked)
Privacy
50820 readers
623 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
I think people see the word "row" is being interpreted as a horizontal line of content on a feed page because they don't know the computing definition of "data record"
And yeah, when you give a company license to do whatever they want with your data, “whatever they want” includes AI.
I think an important point is that with the decline of Pinterest's popularity, most of their data was probably acquired many years before genAI became mainstream. (Like I think I only used it around 2008-2010.) So most users probably never imagined their data could be used for training like this in the future.
how unimaginative were they?
In data analytics you sometimes see some weird datasets spanning across a whole lot of columns with what would be otherwise normalised in different records with relations instead.
Shit can be weird in data…
If they were publicly available pins, and users agreed to the license that gave them permission to use their data, then they can do that.
I think the broader issue is people being acclimated to permissive licenses, and not having privacy as a default
A row is just an entry in a database, I have no idea why you would assume each one represents 4-6. It's already bad enough, you don't need to misinform to make it appear worse, you'll only lose credibility.
Are there any good alternatives for pintrest?