mavsman
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.
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> jsrozner
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-ar
e-beco...
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> clickety_clack
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.
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> > kltlp
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."
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> > > anonymous908213
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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jfasi
I can't believe I'm saying this, but the reflexive "ad
tracking bad" that I am most savvy tech practitioners
reach for might deserve some reconsideration in this
case.The thing about advertising on the web and ad
tracking as a practice is that, barring the small matter
of ensuring the economic survival of the publisher sites,
it is almost always a negative for users. When we consider
the marginal benefit of naïve, uninformed-by
surveillance-advertising with the present day status quo,
we find that in exchange for a complete lack of privacy,
we only really receive a marginal improvement in ad
quality. Of course, if you (like me) consider all
advertising to be a negative on the experience of using
the web, it's an even worse deal.The standard response
given by these companies when they bother giving a
response is something to the effect of "we are improving
the experience for our users," which obviously the users
would disagree with. However, when it comes to OpenAI,
they could build a plausible case for this sort of
tracking improving the product. If your models know where
your internet habits are, the responses that you get could
be tuned for both your interest profile and your actual
history of interactions/purchased/internet usage, etc.My
prediction, though: that's not gonna happen. OpenAI Will
first build out the system to collect click and conversion
tracking measurements, then they will turn around to
advertisers and say "look at how good our conversion rates
are y," and then they're going to build an explicit ad
platform that enshittifies their chat products.
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Legend2440
So basically the same kind of tracking that Facebook,
Google, etc have been doing for decades?
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> emptybits
Similar, yes, but some people are paying OpenAI to be
part of this business model, unlike typical
free-riding Google and Facebook users.
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sigzero
Why does ChatGPT need to know that? That should be
illegal.
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> eli
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.
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> jsrozner
Because it's another surveillance adtech company from
SillyCon Valley. Duh.
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> > SoftTalker
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.
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> > > jsrozner
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.See, e.g.,
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/technology/
iran-china-aut...
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> > > coliveira
Governments will also pay for the tracking
capabilities, as they're already doing to
Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
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> > > > SoftTalker
Yes, I should have said "ads and tracking"
good point.
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emerongi
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.
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luke5441
MDN lists how different browsers prevent this:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/Guide
s/...Firefox, Brave and Safari do. Chrome and Edge do not.
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peri-cl
And now Cloudflare knows that I know what ChatGPT knows!
GET /ajax/libs/font-awesome/6.5.2/css/brands.min.css
HTTP/2
Host: cdnjs.cloudflare.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:155.0)
Gecko/20100101 Firefox/155.0
[...yada yada]
Origin: https://www.buchodi.com
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exceptione
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.
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drnick1
My DNS server (which uses Hagezi's excellent blacklists)
returns NXDOMAIN for bzr.openai.com. Serves OpenAI right.
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> jsrozner
I keep meaning to set this up but haven't. What's the
simplest best setup for my own DNS blocker?
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> > drnick1
The easiest off-the-shelf option would be a router
running OpenWrt. IIRC, it natively uses dnsmasq,
and the relevant blacklists can be obtained from
here:https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklistsMy
own setup is DIY: a Debian box running Unbound
(recursive DNS) with the RPZ blacklists from
above. This gets rid of the upstream DNS service
such as the ISP's completely.
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> > kuerbel
Hmmm Pihole I guess. Runs on a pi zero (1 or 2 but
2 is better ofc)
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tgsovlerkhgsel
This is why you use Firefox that keeps the cookie jars
separate (by default, AFAIK). That should prevent this
specific implementation, shouldn't it?
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> JoshTriplett
Yes, it should. But this is also why you use uBlock
Origin to block tracker scripts.
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> tgv
There are other ways to track. Containers offer a bit
mote protection, but the IP address is still visible
(unless VPN).
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AznHisoka
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/
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hbcondo714
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-7
da...
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Avshalom
Yuuup. tracking consumers and finding spending
correlations to exploit was the entire reason for the
"Data Science" and "ML" pushes that got us here.
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measurablefunc
Every AI company is also a surveillance company. It's the
only way to get all the necessary training data. The fact
that they're now also an advertising agency is incidental.
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BCM43
This has been around since at least April:
https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/the-openai-
pi...
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retube
The defence is simply to delete your cookies?
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2198276
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?
You are absolutely insane giving any of your thoughts,
trolls, speculations to a surveillance website under your
login.
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> claaams
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.
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> alansaber
They were always going to do surveillance. At least
now you get a trendy e-commerce site recommendation
too.
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jamienk
We. Are. FUCKED.THIS is where the regulation needs to
start.
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> zx8080
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.
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hagbard_c
...only if and when you allow: - 3d party cookies
- ads and other 'malcontent'
...which you should never do. As to the 3d party cookies
there might be some rare exception where those can be
useful but ads? Never, ever allow those on any device you
use. Block them as if they're the radioactive plague
because they are. Fight them on the beaches, fight them on
the landing grounds, fight them in the fields and in the
streets, fight them in the hills, never surrender.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.
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ck2
imagine stealing tons of content from every source on
earth and then running ads on itif 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
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> jsrozner
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-s
crapin...). So yes, the AI companies have even more
thoroughly stolen the collective work of humanity than
Google did.
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> emerongi
> imagine stealing tons of content from every source
on earth and then running ads on itThis has
effectively been Google's business for decades. Not in
the same form, but the concept is the same.
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