Due to the Photobucket news, took a few hours today to download all of my old stuff from way beyond Gaia Online days, including photos of my old cosplay days of yore (and get dates) and...man, did it hurt to delete all the images. Deleting the account was not going to be done on time--since it has to be before July 22 before the AI/image selling kicks in but it takes 30 days, so. Do the math--so I opted instead to delete all my images and deal with account deletion later.
But it still hurt cuz like, that was still history, you know? Thanks yet again to AI training and even going so far to sell our images--But I'm glad I was still able to download everything.
In lieu of posting the entire email they sent today (mind the hyperbole a bit, but they copy/pasted the relevant parts of the email): https://new.reddit.com/r/photobucket/comments/1e3q0nb/photobucket_has_been_purchased_by_a_scam/
Funny enough, when trying to look for a news article instead...turns out they were planning this since October of last year, and this year in April they "announced" it (?) to news sites before being ~kind~ enough to alert users *today*
"(CEO) Leonard says he can do this because last October the company changed its terms of service to grant it “unrestricted rights” to sell any uploaded content for the purpose of AI training.
“We need to pay our bills, and this could give us the ability to continue to support free accounts,” Leonard tells Reuters."
What a troglodyte. At least he's honest!