Well, I think this goes to show that we can't expect writers hired by Matt and Automattic to report on Automattic in an unbiased manner.

Selling people's content unless they opt-out is obviously a dark pattern. And a blogging platform like WordPress.com or tumblr often attracts high investment content that people would want to protect. Automattic has also been making claims that if people opt-out late, they will somehow retroactively get people's content out of training sets just by asking nicely.

I'm to hear the data Jepack takes is not currently included. But considering Jetpack's invasive data practices (taking data supposedly needed for features that are not even enabled, including all of the content in a site), I think whether Automattic will be selling content it takes from WordPress.org is still a concern.

I don't expect WP Tavern to just dunk on Automattic, but this defensive coverage is still infuriating.