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teekerttoday at 2:52 PM4 repliesview on HN

I don't have that toggle (but could indeed have sworn I saw it earlier).

Sorry, I have always thought that "opting in" is, "opting for the presented option" and opting out is "opting out of it", so opting out [of sharing prompts for training] is choosing to not share, but apparently I was wrong my whole life. I'm not a native speaker, and I think most people here (in my country) would interpret this the way I do? Weird but TIL.


Replies

bee_ridertoday at 3:06 PM

FWIW I don’t find what you wrote confusing, but I do think it is following a sort of… bad convention that some companies have been pushing.

Opt-in and opt-out describe the nature of the choice that you make. “Opt” means to choose (apparently it is a French word we stole). Opt-in means you have to proactively choose to be in. Opt-out means you have to proactively choose to be out. “Opt-in by default” is an overly verbose way of saying “opt-out.”

In either case it describes the choice that you need to proactively make to override the default behavior.

Edit: I should also say that it is a “known point of contention” where pro-privacy people have been pushing back on this phrasing. So, you have probably accidentally stumbled into an ongoing discussion, which is why some of the comments might be unexpectedly prickly.

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throwaway89201today at 3:26 PM

> I don't have that toggle (but could indeed have sworn I saw it earlier).

You don't see "Allow the use of your interactions with Vibe to train Mistral’s AI models" at https://admin.mistral.ai/vibe/privacy ?

And "Allow the use of your API calls to train Mistral’s AI models" at https://admin.mistral.ai/plateforme/privacy ?

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Miraltartoday at 2:57 PM

If you opt in it means that by default you're not in and you chose that option. So if you're now included in training by default, then it's an opt-out feature as in you can opt out of it.

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tedgghtoday at 3:00 PM

You said it correctly, there’s no confusion.