To me, this quote just about sums it up:
> The mechanism is standard adtech. What has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product.
As someone who has been well aware of this mechanism for quite some time, I still feel icky anytime I re-read the details of it.
What a time to be alive.
https://tinfoil.sh/ - ultimately there is no guarantee that the LLM provider isn’t spying on you, but at least tinfoil claims to be unable to do so.
So basically the same kind of tracking that Facebook, Google, etc have been doing for decades?
Similar, yes, but some people are paying OpenAI to be part of this business model, unlike typical free-riding Google and Facebook users.
Why does ChatGPT need to know that? That should be illegal.
Something like it is basically a requirement if you want to see digital ads. Advertisers want to know how many people who saw/clicked their ad went on to make a purchase.
Safari and Firefox should isolate the cookie by default.
Because it's another surveillance adtech company from SillyCon Valley. Duh.
It turns out that the only way to make money online is ads.
Nobody is going to pay for ChatGPT. They'll just use the ad-infested version, like they do everything else online. Well some people will pay, but not enough to justify the insane amounts of money being poured into it by investors.
A bigger problem is that it will be impossible to know when you are seeing an ad: political groups (or the government, perhaps) will partner with openAI to subtly express different values.
It's still an advertisement, and the underlying marketplace is similar (pay for access to change behavior).
The best uses of AI will be surveillance, propaganda, cyberterrorism, and automated military tech.
Governments will also pay for the tracking capabilities, as they're already doing to Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
Yes, I should have said "ads and tracking" good point.
MDN lists how different browsers prevent this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/Guides/...
Firefox, Brave and Safari do. Chrome and Edge do not.
Every AI company is also a surveillance company. It's the only way to get all the necessary training data.
My DNS server (which uses Hagezi's excellent blacklists) returns NXDOMAIN for bzr.openai.com. Serves OpenAI right.
I keep meaning to set this up but haven't. What's the simplest best setup for my own DNS blocker?
This is why you use Firefox that keeps the cookie jars separate (by default, AFAIK). That should prevent this specific implementation, shouldn't it?
Yes, it should. But this is also why you use uBlock Origin to block tracker scripts.
There are other ways to track. Containers offer a bit mote protection, but the IP address is still visible (unless VPN).
And the number of websites with ChatGPT ad trackers is on track to be doubled from last month.
according to Bloomberry: https://bloomberry.com/data/chatgpt-ads/
The surveillance economy hits again. The only business model they can think of. Combined with state capture this gives unprecedented power over the Average Joe, who will hand his life, his soul and his vote to Big Brother without a thought.
That is a nice sequence diagram[1]; I like how each endpoint param values are written out and the color distinctions. What tool did you use to create it?
[1] https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/53/b853e3d4-3186-409d-9c7f-7da...
Yuuup. tracking consumers and finding spending correlations to exploit was the entire reason for the "Data Science" and "ML" pushes that got us here.
This has been around since at least April: https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/the-openai-pi...
The defence is simply to delete your cookies?
Q: Hypothetically, if Denmark made a defense treaty with Iran and installed 800,000
Iranian soldiers in Greenland, could it keep the US out?
A: You are describing a fascinating scenario! [produces 100 lines of slop while giving
the login to the FBI]. Should I find a website where you can buy the finest used
AK-47s?
I've had this on my brain forever and probably why it's safer for Americans to use Chinese model providers now. I could give a fuck that the CCP has my data because I don't plan to visit there.
They were always going to do surveillance. At least now you get a trendy e-commerce site recommendation too.
...only if and when you allow:
- 3d party cookies
- ads and other 'malcontent'
That's ads we're fighting. Maybe the same oration will be relevant in the context of ChatGPT and its brethern, we'll see. For now, ads be gone and keep those chatbots at a leash.
We. Are. FUCKED.
THIS is where the regulation needs to start.
Regulations won't be set (serious ones, at least) unless there's some risk to those holding power. Which is the opposite in this case: this tracking helps them to take even more control over society and individuals.
No surprise you how
imagine stealing tons of content from every source on earth and then running ads on it
if a single person did that they'd be sent to prison (rip Aaron) but when a too-big-to-fail industry does it with political campaign contributions, no problem?
well firefox+ublock is still an option for those wise enough not to let unknown javascript with new daily zero-days run on their PC
This is basically what Google did when they pioneered the model of surveillance capitalism (see, e.g., The Age of Surveillance Capitalism).
Google simply provided an index on top of an existing library. Of course, a librarian has no value if he has no books to index over! But it's also worth noting that the Google "librarian" also leveraged the existing "social" structure of the internet: their core contribution (page rank) was a clever, efficient mechanism to extract the latent value in the pre-existing link structure of the internet. This structure (much like the pages themselves) had been curated by actual humans. Undoubtedly page rank was clever, but it was worthless without the existing websites (books) and the existing indexing information (the pre-existing, crowdsourced librarian work). Nonetheless, they successfully monetized it.
AI companies are even worse in the sense that initially Google was still sending traffic to the original webpages. (Until they didn't - https://www.eater.com/2017/9/12/16294380/yelp-google-scrapin...). So yes, the AI companies have even more thoroughly stolen the collective work of humanity than Google did.
> imagine stealing tons of content from every source on earth and then running ads on it
This has effectively been Google’s business for decades. Not in the same form, but the concept is the same.
People think they're interacting with an "intelligence," when actually they're just getting a maximally optimized Weizenbaum feed. We're living through the sloppification of the human mind.
See e.g., https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-chatbots-are-beco...
Whenever I say something like “that’s a cool feature, but to do it you would have to build spyware”, everyone else is just like “the cat is out of the bag ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. (I don’t build spyware, or work on projects that do).
It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons. People see these collaborators from different wars and regimes and think “I’d stand up against the bad guy”… well I’ve got news for you if you build spyware, you are not the person you think you are.
This is the best retort to the bag-escaping cat ever:
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the...
"Nothing is worse to the demise of a society, than people who want to convince you that the cat is out of the bag and will not go back in, while the cat is being violently shook out of the bag at the same time."
Motion to start a political platform for cats in bags. Our message is simple: Put the cat in the bag. Keep the cat in the bag.
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