8 ms·

ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector

744 points by lmbbuchodi 23d ago

amelius 22d ago
AI is really becoming a god that sees/knows everything. Just what we needed ...
lambdaone 22d ago
Incredibly creepy. I'm amazed they don't have any idea quite how user-hostile this is, or the reception it would receive.
Legend2440 23d ago
So basically the same kind of tracking that Facebook, Google, etc have been doing for decades?
- emptybits 23d ago
  Similar, yes, but some people are paying OpenAI to be part of this business model, unlike typical free-riding Google and Facebook users.
  - deleted 23d ago
    [deleted]
  - troupo 23d ago
    Derogatory "Free-riding users". "Free riding users" should have the same privacy as the paying ones.
    - rangestransform 22d ago
      Will the government pay OpenAI to run an ad-free free tier?
      - upboundspiral 22d ago
        The government could pass laws that prevent advertising becoming mass surveillance and stalking.
      - troupo 22d ago
        Ads don't require pervasive and invasive tracking, and surveillance that Stasi would have wet dreams about.
    - what 22d ago
      Kind of silly. You have to pay somehow. Either pony up cash or pay with your eyeballs or data. But I doubt paying will give you privacy either.
      - pona-a 22d ago
        I think few will argue it's ethically or legally fine for my website to pay by installing a keylogger through a zero-click Chromium RCE, burying it in the EULA.
      - troupo 22d ago
        Ads don't require pervasive and invasive tracking, and surveillance that Stasi would have wet dreams about.
  - theptip 23d ago
    If you pay OpenAI full price, this machinery should never be used. The only paying customers getting ads are the “ad supported” tier. I think you can easily imagine a future where the subscription model token subsidy ramps down and is replaced by ads, but it’s important to use precise language about the current state of the world.
    - emptybits 22d ago
      Yes, “Go” plan users pay and also receive ads. They pay less.
- gentlewater 23d ago
  Which has really only been accepted because 99% of people don’t understand how it works. Hard to be outraged by something you can’t see or understand. In my book, the practice is akin to malware. I recently opened a website for an AI service in incognito mode, because I didn’t care to have it in my search results. Despite avoiding third party cookies here, the site still fired off a tracker to Meta, who then correlated my home IP address with my Facebook account, and filled my feed with ads for this AI service. When I was tracked like this despite a somewhat informed defense, which defense do normal people have against this? None.
- latexr 23d ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism The fact that others do the same doesn’t make any of the cases excusable.
- rvz 23d ago
  Yes. But there is no surprise given that OpenAI hired lots of ex-Meta and Google employees for that reason.
- jhhh 22d ago
  Yes, the thing that many people do not like is now being done by yet another company.
mavsman 23d ago
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.
- clickety_clack 23d ago
  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.
  - kltlp 23d ago
    This is the best retort to the bag-escaping cat ever: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the-fields-medallists-letter/#comment-540888 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."
    - anonymous908213 23d ago
      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.
      - TeMPOraL 23d ago
        Don't force it out of the bag if it doesn't want to leave.
Avshalom 23d ago
Yuuup. tracking consumers and finding spending correlations to exploit was the entire reason for the "Data Science" and "ML" pushes that got us here.
BCM43 23d ago
This has been around since at least April: https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/the-openai-pixel-has-landed-amazons-credit-card-ban-triggers-an-ad-boycott/ https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/the-openai-pi...
ck2 23d ago
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
- emerongi 23d ago
  > 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.
- jsrozner 23d ago
  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-scraping-feud 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.
  - ck2 23d ago
    remember the cache: search of google so they basically have copies already of every webpage until they turned it off a few years ago (well they may still have it updated but not provide it as a service) so it occurs to me they most definitely trained their "AI" on all that user cache they may have even just turned it off as a service when they realized other "AI" could do the same thing
craniumjello 23d ago
No surprise you how
AznHisoka 23d ago
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/ https://bloomberry.com/data/chatgpt-ads/
hbcondo714 23d ago
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-7da931a60431/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-20-at-5.00.35---PM.png https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/53/b853e3d4-3186-409d-9c7f-7da...
- gpugreg 23d ago
  I don't know the tool used here, but DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash with bash can create a somewhat similar SVG: https://asdf10.com/diagram.svg https://asdf10.com/diagram.svg Disclaimer: I cut it off after a few minutes because I got impatient. It could have gotten closer if I waited longer.
2198276 23d ago
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.
- alansaber 23d ago
  They were always going to do surveillance. At least now you get a trendy e-commerce site recommendation too.
- claaams 23d ago
  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.
tgsovlerkhgsel 23d ago
This is why you use Firefox that keeps the cookie jars separate (by default, AFAIK). That should prevent this specific implementation, shouldn't it?
- tgv 23d ago
  There are other ways to track. Containers offer a bit mote protection, but the IP address is still visible (unless VPN).
  - armadyl 23d ago
    Containers don’t offer a benefit over normal browsing for this, Firefox already blocks and isolates third party cookies.
    - tgv 23d ago
      Caching is also a tracking signal.
      - mitxela 23d ago
        Caches are also isolated. One of the reasons you shouldn't use a JavaScript CDN any more.
        oenton 22d ago
        I assume you mean a public CDN, like code.jquery.com. There’s still reasons to serve JavaScript from your own CDN, like code splitting and serving the bundles closer to the user.
- JoshTriplett 23d ago
  Yes, it should. But this is also why you use uBlock Origin to block tracker scripts.
- consumer451 23d ago
jamienk 23d ago
We. Are. FUCKED. THIS is where the regulation needs to start.
- zx8080 23d ago
  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.
  - jamienk 23d ago
    But politics is when people who feel differently try to do something about it
- dualvariable 23d ago
  Any regulation will be geared toward protecting the profits of the AI companies, and not toward consumer protection.
  - tensor 22d ago
    Maybe it's time you all voted for people who might change that? It's really amazing to me how on the one hand people in the US seem to crow about democracy all the time, yet also just accept as a fact that their government will never actually work to help them.
    - dualvariable 22d ago
      I threw money behind getting Bernie nominated over Biden--none of this shit is my fault.
exceptione 23d ago
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.
drnick1 23d ago
My DNS server (which uses Hagezi's excellent blacklists) returns NXDOMAIN for bzr.openai.com. Serves OpenAI right.
- jsrozner 23d ago
  I keep meaning to set this up but haven't. What's the simplest best setup for my own DNS blocker?
  - drnick1 23d ago
    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-blocklists https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists My 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, and prevents tampering or censorship.
  - kuerbel 23d ago
    Hmmm Pihole I guess. Runs on a pi zero (1 or 2 but 2 is better ofc)
  - eevahr 23d ago
    For simplicity I highly recommend https://nextdns.io https://nextdns.io. Supports most devices, and probably most, if not all, well known blacklists.
    - Melatonic 22d ago
      Also recommend NextDNS Forget if they have Hagezi though. Also it would be really nice if there was a way to export and import custom URL lists and rules....
  - anygivnthursday 23d ago
    For a home network network pihole or unbound also supports blocklists (bundled with opnsense for example if you also want a firewall). For Android, I use Rethink with Hagezi blocklists, so they block also when I am on mobile data (it is vpn based).
sigzero 23d ago
Why does ChatGPT need to know that? That should be illegal.
- jsrozner 23d ago
  Because it's another surveillance adtech company from SillyCon Valley. Duh.
  - SoftTalker 23d ago
    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.
    - coliveira 23d ago
      Governments will also pay for the tracking capabilities, as they're already doing to Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
      - SoftTalker 23d ago
        Yes, I should have said "ads and tracking" good point.
    - jsrozner 23d ago
      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-autonomous-ai-influence-campaigns.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/technology/iran-china-aut...
retube 23d ago
The defence is simply to delete your cookies?
luke5441 23d ago
MDN lists how different browsers prevent this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/Guides/Third-party_cookies#how_do_browsers_handle_third-party_cookies https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/Guides/... Firefox, Brave and Safari do. Chrome and Edge do not.
- skybrian 23d ago
  Not an accurate summary. That link actually says: > Google Chrome doesn't block third-party cookies by default, only in Incognito mode, or when users explicitly set it to block third-party cookies via chrome://settings. Looks like the settings let you block all third-party cookies and add exceptions for specific sites, which seems a bit awkward but could be made to work. Alternatively, you could run OpenAI in its own profile, or look into what extensions might do.
  - troupo 23d ago
    > Google Chrome doesn't block third-party cookies by default, only in Incognito mode And the focus on cookies only is also intentionally misleading. Tracking is not just cookies. Chrome will track you in Incognito mode.
  - nicce 23d ago
    I think that if they don’t block by default, is quite significant. Chrome + Edge has superior marketshare and then add the % people who have no idea what these mean and don’t change defaults.
  - gruez 23d ago
    >Looks like the settings let you block all third-party cookies and add exceptions for specific sites, which seems a bit awkward but could be made to work. The fear over blocking third party cookies breaking stuff is severely overstated. I have it disabled by default and I don't think I've ever seen any website breakages. The most is office365 nagging me to click on links so it can authenticate across domains.
  - Andrex 22d ago
hagbard_c 23d ago
...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.
- hagbard_c 22d ago
  So, knee-jerk-down-voter, what is it about what I said here which irked you so much that you just had to press that irksome button again? Or is it just because I happen to have said something else sometime earlier which makes you obligated by doctrine to down-vote whatever else I write? Let us know. Do you work in ad-tech? Don't you like the (ab)use of the Churchill quote? Is it the suggestion that it might be needed in relation to ChatGPT et. al. sometime in the future? Enlighten us, don't just attempt to get a dissenting opinion greyed out. That is for cowards, don't hide behind that button, don't be a craving coward, don't be a sheep. This is, after all, a discussion board, not some online likes competition where you get brownie points for getting rid of dissenters. ...or maybe it is the latter for some, maybe it is a way for some to raise their status among their co-religionists? Comrade Knee-Jerk, what did you do for the cause today? Answer me! Somewhere among the crowd a figure emerges, clearly nervous. He tries to speak but starts stammering, stops and tries again. What is he afraid of? - Oh Great Leader, today I did the work to banish one of the hated dissenters from the internets by voting down his malign words so that no others may be subjected to anything but the Desired Narrative. Is that all you did, Comrade Knee-Jerk? Is that how you claim your worth for the Great Cause? I am dissapointed, Comrade Knee-Jerk. - Oh Great Leader, I will do better, I will educate myself, I will do my part to eradicate dissent from the internets for the Great Cause, I p...p....promise! I do not like to be disappointed again, Comrade Knee-Jerk! I will have to think over your position, whether you are truly committed to the Great Cause. Now hide yourself. Comrade Zlither, what did you do for the cause today? Answer me!
measurablefunc 23d ago
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.
- gruez 23d ago
  >It's the only way to get all the necessary training data. That... does not follow. The information you're getting with this is what sites a user visits. That's creepy and valuable for advertising purposes, but is hardly the type of that that's going to bring about ASI, which is what all the AI labs are working towards. That's why they're hiring data annotators (sometimes with masters or phds) to get training data.
  - measurablefunc 22d ago
    Ok, good to know.
emerongi 23d ago
https://tinfoil.sh/ 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.
deleted 23d ago
[deleted]
jfasi 23d ago
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/purchases/internet usage, etc. Imagine a world in which you can opt into this tracking, control the data you provide and how it’s used, clear it out and redact it as you please, and opt in and out of responses that are personalized against it. Reasonable people can disagree, but that might actually be useful. 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,“ and then they’re going to build an explicit ad platform that enshittifies their chat products.
- mitxela 23d ago
  Yeah Google benefits you by tracking you and delivering more relevant ads too. Doesn't make it any less creepy.
1saadcodes 23d ago
The technology isn't anything new but, it's the context that makes it so uncomfortable. People have very different "expectations" of privacy when they're having a conversation with an AI VS when they're browsing something like Facebook Not to mention Facebook is free whereas you pay for a GPT subscription
- ben_w 23d ago
  I'm old enough to remember when people had expectations of privacy on Facebook, when the discovery that they didn't made for schocked headlines.
  - bigyabai 23d ago
    You know, Facebook, built by the guy who scraped college databases for personal information without the student's permission. There was never any expectation of privacy if you knew Zuck's history. Facemash almost got him expelled for violating individual privacy.
    - ben_w 23d ago
      That's the trick: in the early years, most people didn't know Zuckerberg's history.
      - bigyabai 23d ago
        Caveat emptor, the saying goes. If people don't have an appetite for privacy, don't expect them to take a principled stance based on outrageous headlines. It's not a coincidence that federally backdoored spyware like Windows is the most popular operating system in the world. I too remember the shocked headlines of the Snowden revelations, and ten-plus years later I work shoulder to shoulder with people that couldn't possibly care less. There is no expectation of privacy, HN too quickly extrapolates it's own virtue signalling to normal people that enjoy using spyware like TikTok, Facebook and Windows.
        22d ago
Razengan 23d ago
Does blocking `bzr.openai.com` on the DNS server prevent this? (without breaking ChatGPT)
- Melatonic 22d ago
  Exactly what I was wondering. Guessing maybe there's more URLs to list or maybe can do a wildcard block of *.bzr.openai.com and then whitelist more specific stuff if necessary Edit: looks like it's already blocked by Hagezi Multi Pro (and maybe lower levels) and OISD :-D
swe_dima 23d ago
Was considering buying ads on ChatGPT. A damning thing is that yours audience then are users too cheap to buy a sub...
- bigyabai 23d ago
  That's a problem with most unsolicited online advertising. Are YouTube ad-watchers any more likely to splurge on your SaaS?
  - darraghmckay 23d ago
    It's slightly different though, considering a lot of ad spend is for B2B products/services, and a lot of work pay for ChatGPT, so its only people who's work won't pay for a pro subscription. Whereas, YouTube is for personal consumption in almost all cases, doesn't say anything about your employers willingness to invest in software/services
- downrightmike 22d ago
  Just like mobile apps, subs will never come close to the growth expectation. Given trillions are tied up in AI, subs aren't going to do it.
startup_zombie_ 23d ago
[dead]
vcryan 23d ago
Well, I don't go to website anymore... so ha! ;)
DevKoala 23d ago
> The mechanism is standard adtech. What has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product. Doesn’t Gemini or whatever Meta’s agent is do this too?
gruez 23d ago
I spent 10 seconds skimming this blog post until realizing it's just AI generated (ironic) slop describing how third party cookie tracking works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_cookies#Mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_cookies#Mechanism Everyone would be far better off if the author just posted "OpenAI uses third party cookies [wikipedia link]", except maybe the author who wouldn't as many subscriptions for his "threat intel" newsletter.
- buchodi 23d ago
  There are specific details about how the mechanism works like the cookie name (__obi) that can help defenders.
  - gruez 23d ago
    I'm not aware of any filter lists that blocks based on cookie name. It's almost always done at the URL level. Moreover it's bog standard 3rd party cookie tracking. At least for the purposes of "help defenders", there's nothing in the blog post that couldn't be found in 10s with browser devtools.
    - zahlman 23d ago
      > there's nothing in the blog post that couldn't be found in 10s with browser devtools. The audience of people who can read and understand an explanation like this one is probably quite a bit larger than the ones who can replicate the experiment themselves.
      - TeMPOraL 23d ago
        And larger still than the ones who would bother to replicate the experiment themselves. Yeah, I could tell few sentences in that it's Claude-written article. The style has become that distinctive. Hell, a third of the articles I opened on the HN front page today carried that distinctive style. Doesn't really matter if the content is worth it (and I just realized that recognizing Claude in this also makes me wary of ways this could paper over key details - at this point I start to recognize from my own experience where Claude may be papering over something it didn't actually bother to check).
Jazgot 23d ago
Time to start having separate container for every domain. I'm pretty sure this should be possible in Firefox.
- gruez 23d ago
  Firefox (effectively) already does that by default. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cookie-protection-standard-mode https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cooki...
- deleted 23d ago
  [deleted]
- LtWorf 23d ago
  Doesn't really matter, they can track you in several ways.
  - mitxela 23d ago
    Because at least one mechanism of tracking still exists we should just give up on blocking any of them?
shevy-java 23d ago
SpyGPT.
bilsbie 23d ago
Is this how random sites know what I search for?
- bandofthehawk 22d ago
  Yes, third party cookies have been around for a long time to share info about you between sites. Make sure you turn them off in whatever browser you are using.
thih9 23d ago
I am once again happy that the EU is fighting practices like these via legislation. Some outcomes can be annoying, but the net result is still positive, for the consumers and their data privacy at least.
- surcap526 23d ago
  [dead]
- Joel_Mckay 23d ago
  Unfortunately, most LLM companies always were naturally an intelligence operation on civilians, and determining if they are now state-backed seems like a irrelevant detail. Privacy has been dead for some time now. The fact is most business people never figure out how they are exploited. The modern intelligence campaigns just made it economical to hit almost everyone regardless of scale... often under some silly pretense like terrorists wanting our underpants. =3
- bko 23d ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 23d ago
    [deleted]
  - Avicebron 23d ago
    > The outcome is that very little serious technology or influential companies come out of Europe. And salaries for things like engineer are about a third of that in the US. So your argument is abusive practices are required for the creation of influential companies, serious technology, and high paying salaries?
    - bko 23d ago
      No but overly burdensome regulatory bodies that are concerned about such things like how the top of my bottle cap functions and how low i set my ac temp leads to an incredibly hostile business environment and stagnant culture. But like I said, nice place to visit for the time being.
leo_proger 23d ago
crazy dude. chatgpt can't even see the full page content when searching the web and you're saying this...
armchairhacker 23d ago
The ideal personal assistant should know what you do on other websites, and your personal files etc. But it should be local.
- al_borland 23d ago
  Even if I had an actual human person assistant, there would be parts of my life I would want to keep private.
- 13415 23d ago
  Absolutely not. An ideal personal assistant should know about you exactly what you want them to know about you, and usually that's in a business context only.
kats 23d ago
Oh, the lifechanging technology isn't completely 100% free? They sell ads just like a bajillion other things?
- applfanboysbgon 23d ago
  ChatGPT is not 100% free in the first place, and this is about tracking and selling your data, not the existence of ads themselves.
rvz 23d ago
Just remember it is the same ex-Meta employees who are now at OpenAI adding Ad features into ChatGPT. Why? Because they are saving humanity. /s Facebook tracks you outside of their own website for the same reason, and now ChatGPT does the same for the sake of...Ads. I told you so. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996936
atoav 23d ago
Take this with a grain of salt or as a very edgy, polemic take: I think we really need to hold the individuals running ad networks personally liable for the violation of our privacy rights.
the_gipsy 22d ago
Suspiciously sounds like they need an escape out of the profitability lie. /tinfoil-hat
nelsonfigueroa 22d ago
why is OpenAI wasting their efforts on implementing ads if they are apparently close to AGI?
- jrflo 22d ago
  I would assume the skill set for implementing ads is quite different than the skill set for developing new models, so it’s quite reasonable to expect different teams are working on each
- smokel 22d ago
  AGI will most likely have told them that this is the cheapest way to become rich.
lambdaone 22d ago
Creepy as fuck. I'm really suprised they don't understand quite how user-hostile this is.
- ElProlactin 22d ago
  > I'm really suprised they don't understand quite how user-hostile this is. I'm really surprised anyone thinks these companies care.
varenc 22d ago
For browsers that implement strict cookie partitioning, the privacy concern is moot. With this, the cookie jar that's used when chatgpt.com is a 3rd party site is completely separate for the jar used on the 1st party site. So your chatgpt.com account can't be linked to your ad views. Since this has been standard ad tech for awhile, browsers have reacted to this to implement cookie partitioning for exactly these privacy reasons.
- ferro_ 22d ago
  Modern adtech fingerprints your browser regardless of cookies, so they can still know who you are. The fingerprint consists of a combination of facts about your browser that together uniquely identify it (screen resolution, timezone, installed fonts and browser extensions, OS version, User agent, even GPU with some forms of canvas fingerprinting, etc.) ChatGPT uses fingerprinting too. Cookie isolation isn't relevant, only anti fingerprinting techniques are.
xyst 22d ago
The entire ad tech industry may truly be an intelligence agency front. The lengths they go to track individuals is quite alarming. Much of this information plus a shit ton of other information (ie, LEOs have access to credit reporting) can be bought by governments from the shady data broker networks already. If people still ignorantly claim this isn’t a George Orwellian dystopia …
- Andrex 22d ago
  > The entire ad tech industry may truly be an intelligence agency front. The lengths they go to track individuals is quite alarming. Never attribute to malice what can be explained as greed. The quiet part you rarely hear is that advertising is a smoke and mirror industry akin to throwing darts at a wall. The idea of "homing darts" that stick the target a percentage more of the time would be very attractive in this analogy. Tech turns advertising from mostly a buckshot spread into something that kinda sounds like something solid and real ("Look, numbers! CTR! CPC! KPI! Our ad product WORKS! Paying customers for your business, guaranteed!") Ad budgets almost never correlate with actual performance.[0] We're all just lying to ourselves that this business model is performing as expected, and I don't think a reckoning is that far off. 0. https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-big-brands-stopped-spending-on-digital-ads-nothing-happened-why/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...
  - inetknght 22d ago
    > Never attribute to malice what can be explained as greed. Why attribute to greed when the effects are indistinguishable from malice?
sergiotapia 22d ago
Highly recommend you use Brave Browser and avoid all this nastiness. If you haven't browsed the web in a browser like Chrome recently, you should try it in a VM or something. It's GRIM. The Web is a wasteland and it's gotten worse because ai chatsites are eating their lunch to the ads are even worse than 10 years ago. https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/
duhhhhh1212 22d ago
https://www.pangram.com/history/c3ad864f-2a50-4785-a0ef-71f289ec003f?ucc=t8c6BkzVOh8 https://www.pangram.com/history/c3ad864f-2a50-4785-a0ef-71f2... why not use your own words? If you are gonna ai generate this blog, just post the prompts instead.
- handoflixue 22d ago
  There's a certain irony in linking to someone else and then saying "use your own words". If we follow that, we get a pretty obvious answer: sometimes someone else can express it better and faster. Most people do not, in fact, want to read raw prompts.
  - nicce 22d ago
    > Most people do not, in fact, want to read raw prompts. I also wonder what is the energy consumptiom difference between the prompt and fetching website.
  - crmd 22d ago
    It’s misleading to post model output on a blog, especially when the about says > This blog is where I write about what I find. Why not simply include a disclaimer that it was AI model output not his own writing? Because humans don’t like AI writing and the article wouldn’t be featured on as many tech news sites. Hence the sin of omission, the choice to mislead.
  - scared_together 22d ago
    Are you referring to the Pangram link? I’d consider that akin to a reference supporting the comment’s point, not a substitute for the comment’s point. > Most people do not, in fact, want to read raw prompts. I wonder if this is really true, and if it will remain true for long. Have you observed someone read another person’s raw prompt? Or observed someone submit both their prompts and their LLM output for review? Personally I’d be curious about the prompts for a lot of top HN articles which are LLM-generated. It would say a lot more about the human operator’s intent and thinking process compared to the LLM output. A coworker who spoke English as a second language once screen shared their Claude session during a code review, and it was interesting that their prompts were all in their native language. The guy wasn’t writing an article, and I didn’t understand the prompt anyway, but I still found it interesting as a glimpse into how he uses LLMs. For this particular article, if the prompt was initially a series of bullet points that wouldn’t be so bad. If there were multiple prompts spent editing and rearranging the article that would be an unusual work by pre-LLM standards. However I’d suggest that instead of dismissing the idea, we could embrace “raw prompts” as a kind of new medium, to cross the divide between pro-LLM and anti-LLM readers.
IceDane 22d ago
Love how there's an extremely lengthy explanation of the oldest way to track people on the internet like this shit hasn't been happening since cookies were created.
threecheese 22d ago
This might help: ``` ||openai.com^$cookie=__obi ``` Does this look right? AdGuard style.
starkeeper 22d ago
Why don't people hate this as much and riot with torches like they do against flock?
riazrizvi 22d ago
I noticed that. I'm getting ads now based on conversations. I'm okay with it. I don't mind relevant ads.
einpoklum 22d ago
No it doesn't, if you: 1. Never register with OpenAI/ChatGPT, and 2. Strongly block ads, e.g. using uBlock Origin + EFF Privacy Badger. Yes, those don't work on Chrome, Edge and other Chromium-based browsers. Also, even then - ChatGPT may be tracking your behavior indirectly through Microsoft's various services and platforms. But we should do our best to undermine mass surveillance and support individual privacy.
- snowbeing 22d ago
  they both work on Helium, which is Chromium-based!
- ghostwords 22d ago
  Privacy Badger works in Chrome, etc. (Manifest V3)
  - einpoklum 22d ago
    Yes, you're right. But uBlock Origin doesn't.
robots0only 22d ago
This is incredibly sad, with google you can atleast use the argument that search was free (which is still weak IMO). But with OAI collecting indiscriminate data on paying customers is just incredibly sad.
- gizmodo59 22d ago
  You can pay for whatever Google service and they still collect this data. Same with meta subscription.
  - Hnrobert42 22d ago
    With paid services, Google generally does not collect. Or at least you can opt out of collection, email scanning, etc.
- mepiethree 22d ago
  The ads are the product that people are paying for. “Consumer” AI is currently marketed as agents that book restaurants for you, buy cat food before you run out, organize your travel, etc. etc. These are targeted ads for a particular restaurant, pet store, airline, etc. Some people find this desirable.
arealaccount 22d ago
I thought 3rd party cookies were blocked on like every major browser, since like forever ago. Is Chrome still allowing this?
- hurfdurf 22d ago
  It's made by an advertising company. Of course it does.
- kylecazar 22d ago
  Chrome still allows it. Safari and Firefox don't.
- ryankrage77 22d ago
  I've got Pi-hole and uBlock, use Firefox container tabs to isolate certain sites, and Firefox still reports it blocked over 2800 trackers this month alone. I wonder how many are still getting through.
JKCalhoun 22d ago
I quit ChatGPT maybe 9 months ago. Through with that.
sanghyunp 22d ago
I'm really feeling how important security is in the age of AI. We need to be careful cookie accept.
bcorigliano 22d ago
This is bad. Like really SUPER bad. Firstly, for professional work you want your AI clean of useless context. Secondly, you also want your AI "unbiased". I know unbiased is not a thing, but at least not as grotesquely biased as towards selling you something would be. Thirdly, as many others are saying, the chamber of reflection effect deepens...
Havoc 22d ago
Adtech based companies are evil
jhhh 22d ago
Part of the reason I stopped using facebook is, beyond the content being terrible, it was super creepy that they would show me ads for things I searched for on other sites. I even have facebook in its own container, but it must have some additional tracking available because it would still know that I was searching for exact clothing brands, college apparel, trips, etc. I already saw gemini integrate some information about me into an answer recently and am getting the feeling I won't be using it much longer. I'm not surprised openAI is going to try to make money similarly. Gross.
- stingraycharles 22d ago
  This is a very common practice called retargeting / behavioral targeting and has existed for about 2 decades at this point. Facebook is hardly the only company that does this. Modern browsers are more strict towards third party cookies, but there are plenty of ways to work around this.
- NothingAboutAny 22d ago
  I was talking about changing banks with my spouse, the following two weeks I get podcast ads and Samsung TV ads about the bank I mentioned. I use all the usual off the shelf "dont track me" stuff like a pihole and a "resit fingerprinting" Firefox fork and a VPN and everything else. I'm not amazed it still somehow got me, just sad.
- saghm 22d ago
  I've never worked in adtech (and hopefully never will), but the first idea that would pop into my head for trying to track people who sequestered their cookies like this would be to have the sites who put in the third-party cookies include the IP address. If only one Facebook account is known to log into that IP, you know who it belongs to, even when there's no active login. I imagine that people actively trying to make money off stuff like this would have come up with plenty more ideas than just this one.
  - grepfru_it 22d ago
    I made a browser extension that opens every tab to a proxy with a new ip address. I have a /25 at home that will keep my browsing more or less anonymous these days. I have another 200 ip addresses available through my colo, but a non residential address limits a lot of sites
prologic 22d ago
Why must every piece or technology, every software service or cloud "thing"™ devolve into Advertising?! That's it, I'm out. No more ChatGPT for me.
- noisy_boy 22d ago
  What I'm more interested is in that the entire model is based on us being reduced to walking talking living breathing coin wallets. It's like a planet scale game where the companies are the players and we carry the loot. We use a great chunk of our lifespan to procure the coins and every company is designed to extract as many coins from us as possible. What happens to this game/real world when this model collapses? We can't procure, they can't extract. What then?
  - prologic 22d ago
    I agree, precisely. I'm kind of sick and tired of it to be honest. What if we collectively (humanity that is), just quit? What if we all stop playing? (I think you're saying this) -- But seriously. Both OpenAI and every other place (gawd I hope others aren't doing this) need to figure out their business model fast™ and make it a viable business without devolving into this tracking, marketing and advertising bullshit some of us have only seen far too often -- that have driven us away from things like Meta/Fac** and others...
soundworlds 22d ago
I noticed my YouTube recommended searches seeming to change based on what Claude has just recommended me the other day. I do wonder how much of this data is being shared between the companies.
jazzcomputer 22d ago
I'm not really a code person, but would I add these filters to UBlock? ||bzr.openai.com^$third-party ||bzrcdn.openai.com^$third-party
bitwize 22d ago
"Now let me read your mind... Ah, it seems you like Castlevania!"
aitoolcrux 22d ago
[flagged]
rambojohnson 22d ago
who knew this was coming...
jwstillwater 22d ago
I noticed that the link for OAI’s ad pixel documentation itself has a tracking referral header to the author’s site (?ref=buchodi.com). Given the nature of the article, my instinct was that this is actually some next-level humour that totally sniped me. But now I’m not so sure- does OAI even have a kickback program? What would referral attribution even do here?
- ambicapter 22d ago
  I'm guessing it's more likely their blogging platform automatically appends a referral header to links.
  - jwstillwater 22d ago
    Oh, yep. Right you are. Just looked at their platform (Ghost) who uses a gently termed “outgoing link tags” system.
nocturndev55 22d ago
[flagged]
Zaraif13 22d ago
Honestly, the big labs are just making the case for open source stronger every day.
bentt 22d ago
If you liked how Facebook turned out, keep giving OpenAI your time, attention, and data.
wodenokoto 22d ago
I know people use chat bots differently and I get that companies see value in personalization, but to me it is extremely valuable that I can start a chat without context. When researching a topic a chatbot can be quite sensitive to certain wording and those can end up steering definitions. Two context free chats on the same topic can go in very different ways depending on how you word things, but when using the notebook feature in Gemini, where every chat becomes part of the context you completely lose the ability to discover if a topic is vaguely defined or have many definitions.
- 1e1a 22d ago
  I never want my new chats contaminated with information from previous sessions for this exact reason.
- abustamam 22d ago
  2 context free chats can go in very different ways even with the same words sometimes! I personally like the option to have context free chat or chats with memories. What I dont want is a chat based on memories that I didn't explicitly consent to (ie browsing history etc)
- Yhippa 22d ago
  My usage of incognito chats using prompts from other sessions has gone way up. I'm tired of it doing the "you're absolutely right" bit for every new piece of information I bring and it completely trying to donate U-turn.
  - demibabs 22d ago
    I feel like having any existing context absolutely poisons the ability to go in a different direction. I’m not sure if there’s a good way to fix this.
mamaluigie 22d ago
My favorite part about AI is that it will eventually lead to the destruction of social media when every post and every comment is AI or cant be proven to not be AI generated. People will eventually get tired of watching content and receiving AI brainwash news. I call it AI Fatigue. Social Media is very quickly becoming Social AI Media...
riversandroads 22d ago
> In observed traffic, scraped identity outnumbered advertiser-supplied identity 685 events to 255. This sentence is even more concerning to me. Scraping user input should never be a way of collecting personal data from a website since it can circumvent any website controls without the website’s out the user’s knowledge.
ak4153 22d ago
Another url to block in Pihole
- Melatonic 22d ago
  What's the domain list ? Skimmed the article but still looking
singularity2001 22d ago
Use "cookie autodelete" plugin!
sinan-faizal 22d ago
wdym? its dangerous and effciant at the same time.

744 points by lmbbuchodi 23d ago

AI is really becoming a god that sees/knows everything. Just what we needed ...

Incredibly creepy. I'm amazed they don't have any idea quite how user-hostile this is, or the reception it would receive.

Legend2440 23d ago

So basically the same kind of tracking that Facebook, Google, etc have been doing for decades?

emptybits 23d ago
Similar, yes, but some people are paying OpenAI to be part of this business model, unlike typical free-riding Google and Facebook users.
- deleted 23d ago
  [deleted]
- troupo 23d ago
  Derogatory "Free-riding users". "Free riding users" should have the same privacy as the paying ones.
  - rangestransform 22d ago
    Will the government pay OpenAI to run an ad-free free tier?
    - upboundspiral 22d ago
      The government could pass laws that prevent advertising becoming mass surveillance and stalking.
    - troupo 22d ago
      Ads don't require pervasive and invasive tracking, and surveillance that Stasi would have wet dreams about.
  - what 22d ago
    Kind of silly. You have to pay somehow. Either pony up cash or pay with your eyeballs or data. But I doubt paying will give you privacy either.
    - pona-a 22d ago
      I think few will argue it's ethically or legally fine for my website to pay by installing a keylogger through a zero-click Chromium RCE, burying it in the EULA.
    - troupo 22d ago
      Ads don't require pervasive and invasive tracking, and surveillance that Stasi would have wet dreams about.
- theptip 23d ago
  If you pay OpenAI full price, this machinery should never be used. The only paying customers getting ads are the “ad supported” tier. I think you can easily imagine a future where the subscription model token subsidy ramps down and is replaced by ads, but it’s important to use precise language about the current state of the world.
  - emptybits 22d ago
    Yes, “Go” plan users pay and also receive ads. They pay less.
gentlewater 23d ago
Which has really only been accepted because 99% of people don’t understand how it works. Hard to be outraged by something you can’t see or understand. In my book, the practice is akin to malware. I recently opened a website for an AI service in incognito mode, because I didn’t care to have it in my search results. Despite avoiding third party cookies here, the site still fired off a tracker to Meta, who then correlated my home IP address with my Facebook account, and filled my feed with ads for this AI service. When I was tracked like this despite a somewhat informed defense, which defense do normal people have against this? None.
latexr 23d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism The fact that others do the same doesn’t make any of the cases excusable.
rvz 23d ago
Yes. But there is no surprise given that OpenAI hired lots of ex-Meta and Google employees for that reason.
jhhh 22d ago
Yes, the thing that many people do not like is now being done by yet another company.

mavsman 23d ago

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.

clickety_clack 23d ago
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.
- kltlp 23d ago
  This is the best retort to the bag-escaping cat ever: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the-fields-medallists-letter/#comment-540888 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."
  - anonymous908213 23d ago
    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.
    - TeMPOraL 23d ago
      Don't force it out of the bag if it doesn't want to leave.

Avshalom 23d ago

Yuuup. tracking consumers and finding spending correlations to exploit was the entire reason for the "Data Science" and "ML" pushes that got us here.

BCM43 23d ago

This has been around since at least April: https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/the-openai-pixel-has-landed-amazons-credit-card-ban-triggers-an-ad-boycott/ https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/the-openai-pi...

ck2 23d ago

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

emerongi 23d ago
> 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.
jsrozner 23d ago
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-scraping-feud 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.
- ck2 23d ago
  remember the cache: search of google so they basically have copies already of every webpage until they turned it off a few years ago (well they may still have it updated but not provide it as a service) so it occurs to me they most definitely trained their "AI" on all that user cache they may have even just turned it off as a service when they realized other "AI" could do the same thing

craniumjello 23d ago

No surprise you how

AznHisoka 23d ago

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/ https://bloomberry.com/data/chatgpt-ads/

hbcondo714 23d ago

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-7da931a60431/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-20-at-5.00.35---PM.png https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/53/b853e3d4-3186-409d-9c7f-7da...

gpugreg 23d ago
I don't know the tool used here, but DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash with bash can create a somewhat similar SVG: https://asdf10.com/diagram.svg https://asdf10.com/diagram.svg Disclaimer: I cut it off after a few minutes because I got impatient. It could have gotten closer if I waited longer.

2198276 23d ago

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.

alansaber 23d ago
They were always going to do surveillance. At least now you get a trendy e-commerce site recommendation too.
claaams 23d ago
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.

tgsovlerkhgsel 23d ago

This is why you use Firefox that keeps the cookie jars separate (by default, AFAIK). That should prevent this specific implementation, shouldn't it?

tgv 23d ago
There are other ways to track. Containers offer a bit mote protection, but the IP address is still visible (unless VPN).
- armadyl 23d ago
  Containers don’t offer a benefit over normal browsing for this, Firefox already blocks and isolates third party cookies.
  - tgv 23d ago
    Caching is also a tracking signal.
    - mitxela 23d ago
      Caches are also isolated. One of the reasons you shouldn't use a JavaScript CDN any more.
      - oenton 22d ago
        I assume you mean a public CDN, like code.jquery.com. There’s still reasons to serve JavaScript from your own CDN, like code splitting and serving the bundles closer to the user.
JoshTriplett 23d ago
Yes, it should. But this is also why you use uBlock Origin to block tracker scripts.
consumer451 23d ago

jamienk 23d ago

We. Are. FUCKED. THIS is where the regulation needs to start.

zx8080 23d ago
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.
- jamienk 23d ago
  But politics is when people who feel differently try to do something about it
dualvariable 23d ago
Any regulation will be geared toward protecting the profits of the AI companies, and not toward consumer protection.
- tensor 22d ago
  Maybe it's time you all voted for people who might change that? It's really amazing to me how on the one hand people in the US seem to crow about democracy all the time, yet also just accept as a fact that their government will never actually work to help them.
  - dualvariable 22d ago
    I threw money behind getting Bernie nominated over Biden--none of this shit is my fault.

exceptione 23d ago

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.

drnick1 23d ago

My DNS server (which uses Hagezi's excellent blacklists) returns NXDOMAIN for bzr.openai.com. Serves OpenAI right.

jsrozner 23d ago
I keep meaning to set this up but haven't. What's the simplest best setup for my own DNS blocker?
- drnick1 23d ago
  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-blocklists https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists My 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, and prevents tampering or censorship.
- kuerbel 23d ago
  Hmmm Pihole I guess. Runs on a pi zero (1 or 2 but 2 is better ofc)
- eevahr 23d ago
  For simplicity I highly recommend https://nextdns.io https://nextdns.io. Supports most devices, and probably most, if not all, well known blacklists.
  - Melatonic 22d ago
    Also recommend NextDNS Forget if they have Hagezi though. Also it would be really nice if there was a way to export and import custom URL lists and rules....
- anygivnthursday 23d ago
  For a home network network pihole or unbound also supports blocklists (bundled with opnsense for example if you also want a firewall). For Android, I use Rethink with Hagezi blocklists, so they block also when I am on mobile data (it is vpn based).

sigzero 23d ago

Why does ChatGPT need to know that? That should be illegal.

jsrozner 23d ago
Because it's another surveillance adtech company from SillyCon Valley. Duh.
- SoftTalker 23d ago
  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.
  - coliveira 23d ago
    Governments will also pay for the tracking capabilities, as they're already doing to Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
    - SoftTalker 23d ago
      Yes, I should have said "ads and tracking" good point.
  - jsrozner 23d ago
    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-autonomous-ai-influence-campaigns.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/technology/iran-china-aut...

retube 23d ago

The defence is simply to delete your cookies?

luke5441 23d ago

MDN lists how different browsers prevent this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/Guides/Third-party_cookies#how_do_browsers_handle_third-party_cookies https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/Guides/... Firefox, Brave and Safari do. Chrome and Edge do not.

skybrian 23d ago
Not an accurate summary. That link actually says: > Google Chrome doesn't block third-party cookies by default, only in Incognito mode, or when users explicitly set it to block third-party cookies via chrome://settings. Looks like the settings let you block all third-party cookies and add exceptions for specific sites, which seems a bit awkward but could be made to work. Alternatively, you could run OpenAI in its own profile, or look into what extensions might do.
- troupo 23d ago
  > Google Chrome doesn't block third-party cookies by default, only in Incognito mode And the focus on cookies only is also intentionally misleading. Tracking is not just cookies. Chrome will track you in Incognito mode.
- nicce 23d ago
  I think that if they don’t block by default, is quite significant. Chrome + Edge has superior marketshare and then add the % people who have no idea what these mean and don’t change defaults.
- gruez 23d ago
  >Looks like the settings let you block all third-party cookies and add exceptions for specific sites, which seems a bit awkward but could be made to work. The fear over blocking third party cookies breaking stuff is severely overstated. I have it disabled by default and I don't think I've ever seen any website breakages. The most is office365 nagging me to click on links so it can authenticate across domains.
- Andrex 22d ago

hagbard_c 23d ago

...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.

hagbard_c 22d ago
So, knee-jerk-down-voter, what is it about what I said here which irked you so much that you just had to press that irksome button again? Or is it just because I happen to have said something else sometime earlier which makes you obligated by doctrine to down-vote whatever else I write? Let us know. Do you work in ad-tech? Don't you like the (ab)use of the Churchill quote? Is it the suggestion that it might be needed in relation to ChatGPT et. al. sometime in the future? Enlighten us, don't just attempt to get a dissenting opinion greyed out. That is for cowards, don't hide behind that button, don't be a craving coward, don't be a sheep. This is, after all, a discussion board, not some online likes competition where you get brownie points for getting rid of dissenters. ...or maybe it is the latter for some, maybe it is a way for some to raise their status among their co-religionists? Comrade Knee-Jerk, what did you do for the cause today? Answer me! Somewhere among the crowd a figure emerges, clearly nervous. He tries to speak but starts stammering, stops and tries again. What is he afraid of? - Oh Great Leader, today I did the work to banish one of the hated dissenters from the internets by voting down his malign words so that no others may be subjected to anything but the Desired Narrative. Is that all you did, Comrade Knee-Jerk? Is that how you claim your worth for the Great Cause? I am dissapointed, Comrade Knee-Jerk. - Oh Great Leader, I will do better, I will educate myself, I will do my part to eradicate dissent from the internets for the Great Cause, I p...p....promise! I do not like to be disappointed again, Comrade Knee-Jerk! I will have to think over your position, whether you are truly committed to the Great Cause. Now hide yourself. Comrade Zlither, what did you do for the cause today? Answer me!

measurablefunc 23d ago

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.

gruez 23d ago
>It's the only way to get all the necessary training data. That... does not follow. The information you're getting with this is what sites a user visits. That's creepy and valuable for advertising purposes, but is hardly the type of that that's going to bring about ASI, which is what all the AI labs are working towards. That's why they're hiring data annotators (sometimes with masters or phds) to get training data.
- measurablefunc 22d ago
  Ok, good to know.

emerongi 23d ago

https://tinfoil.sh/ 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.

deleted 23d ago

[deleted]

jfasi 23d ago

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/purchases/internet usage, etc. Imagine a world in which you can opt into this tracking, control the data you provide and how it’s used, clear it out and redact it as you please, and opt in and out of responses that are personalized against it. Reasonable people can disagree, but that might actually be useful. 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,“ and then they’re going to build an explicit ad platform that enshittifies their chat products.

mitxela 23d ago
Yeah Google benefits you by tracking you and delivering more relevant ads too. Doesn't make it any less creepy.

1saadcodes 23d ago

The technology isn't anything new but, it's the context that makes it so uncomfortable. People have very different "expectations" of privacy when they're having a conversation with an AI VS when they're browsing something like Facebook Not to mention Facebook is free whereas you pay for a GPT subscription

ben_w 23d ago
I'm old enough to remember when people had expectations of privacy on Facebook, when the discovery that they didn't made for schocked headlines.
- bigyabai 23d ago
  You know, Facebook, built by the guy who scraped college databases for personal information without the student's permission. There was never any expectation of privacy if you knew Zuck's history. Facemash almost got him expelled for violating individual privacy.
  - ben_w 23d ago
    That's the trick: in the early years, most people didn't know Zuckerberg's history.
    - bigyabai 23d ago
      Caveat emptor, the saying goes. If people don't have an appetite for privacy, don't expect them to take a principled stance based on outrageous headlines. It's not a coincidence that federally backdoored spyware like Windows is the most popular operating system in the world. I too remember the shocked headlines of the Snowden revelations, and ten-plus years later I work shoulder to shoulder with people that couldn't possibly care less. There is no expectation of privacy, HN too quickly extrapolates it's own virtue signalling to normal people that enjoy using spyware like TikTok, Facebook and Windows.
      - 22d ago

Razengan 23d ago

Does blocking `bzr.openai.com` on the DNS server prevent this? (without breaking ChatGPT)

Melatonic 22d ago
Exactly what I was wondering. Guessing maybe there's more URLs to list or maybe can do a wildcard block of *.bzr.openai.com and then whitelist more specific stuff if necessary Edit: looks like it's already blocked by Hagezi Multi Pro (and maybe lower levels) and OISD :-D

swe_dima 23d ago

Was considering buying ads on ChatGPT. A damning thing is that yours audience then are users too cheap to buy a sub...

bigyabai 23d ago
That's a problem with most unsolicited online advertising. Are YouTube ad-watchers any more likely to splurge on your SaaS?
- darraghmckay 23d ago
  It's slightly different though, considering a lot of ad spend is for B2B products/services, and a lot of work pay for ChatGPT, so its only people who's work won't pay for a pro subscription. Whereas, YouTube is for personal consumption in almost all cases, doesn't say anything about your employers willingness to invest in software/services
downrightmike 22d ago
Just like mobile apps, subs will never come close to the growth expectation. Given trillions are tied up in AI, subs aren't going to do it.

startup_zombie_ 23d ago

[dead]

vcryan 23d ago

Well, I don't go to website anymore... so ha! ;)

DevKoala 23d ago

> The mechanism is standard adtech. What has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product. Doesn’t Gemini or whatever Meta’s agent is do this too?

gruez 23d ago

I spent 10 seconds skimming this blog post until realizing it's just AI generated (ironic) slop describing how third party cookie tracking works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_cookies#Mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_cookies#Mechanism Everyone would be far better off if the author just posted "OpenAI uses third party cookies [wikipedia link]", except maybe the author who wouldn't as many subscriptions for his "threat intel" newsletter.

buchodi 23d ago
There are specific details about how the mechanism works like the cookie name (__obi) that can help defenders.
- gruez 23d ago
  I'm not aware of any filter lists that blocks based on cookie name. It's almost always done at the URL level. Moreover it's bog standard 3rd party cookie tracking. At least for the purposes of "help defenders", there's nothing in the blog post that couldn't be found in 10s with browser devtools.
  - zahlman 23d ago
    > there's nothing in the blog post that couldn't be found in 10s with browser devtools. The audience of people who can read and understand an explanation like this one is probably quite a bit larger than the ones who can replicate the experiment themselves.
    - TeMPOraL 23d ago
      And larger still than the ones who would bother to replicate the experiment themselves. Yeah, I could tell few sentences in that it's Claude-written article. The style has become that distinctive. Hell, a third of the articles I opened on the HN front page today carried that distinctive style. Doesn't really matter if the content is worth it (and I just realized that recognizing Claude in this also makes me wary of ways this could paper over key details - at this point I start to recognize from my own experience where Claude may be papering over something it didn't actually bother to check).

Jazgot 23d ago

Time to start having separate container for every domain. I'm pretty sure this should be possible in Firefox.

gruez 23d ago
Firefox (effectively) already does that by default. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cookie-protection-standard-mode https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cooki...
deleted 23d ago
[deleted]
LtWorf 23d ago
Doesn't really matter, they can track you in several ways.
- mitxela 23d ago
  Because at least one mechanism of tracking still exists we should just give up on blocking any of them?

shevy-java 23d ago

SpyGPT.

bilsbie 23d ago

Is this how random sites know what I search for?

bandofthehawk 22d ago
Yes, third party cookies have been around for a long time to share info about you between sites. Make sure you turn them off in whatever browser you are using.

thih9 23d ago

I am once again happy that the EU is fighting practices like these via legislation. Some outcomes can be annoying, but the net result is still positive, for the consumers and their data privacy at least.

surcap526 23d ago
[dead]
Joel_Mckay 23d ago
Unfortunately, most LLM companies always were naturally an intelligence operation on civilians, and determining if they are now state-backed seems like a irrelevant detail. Privacy has been dead for some time now. The fact is most business people never figure out how they are exploited. The modern intelligence campaigns just made it economical to hit almost everyone regardless of scale... often under some silly pretense like terrorists wanting our underpants. =3
bko 23d ago
[flagged]
- deleted 23d ago
  [deleted]
- Avicebron 23d ago
  > The outcome is that very little serious technology or influential companies come out of Europe. And salaries for things like engineer are about a third of that in the US. So your argument is abusive practices are required for the creation of influential companies, serious technology, and high paying salaries?
  - bko 23d ago
    No but overly burdensome regulatory bodies that are concerned about such things like how the top of my bottle cap functions and how low i set my ac temp leads to an incredibly hostile business environment and stagnant culture. But like I said, nice place to visit for the time being.

leo_proger 23d ago

crazy dude. chatgpt can't even see the full page content when searching the web and you're saying this...

armchairhacker 23d ago

The ideal personal assistant should know what you do on other websites, and your personal files etc. But it should be local.

al_borland 23d ago
Even if I had an actual human person assistant, there would be parts of my life I would want to keep private.
13415 23d ago
Absolutely not. An ideal personal assistant should know about you exactly what you want them to know about you, and usually that's in a business context only.

kats 23d ago

Oh, the lifechanging technology isn't completely 100% free? They sell ads just like a bajillion other things?

applfanboysbgon 23d ago
ChatGPT is not 100% free in the first place, and this is about tracking and selling your data, not the existence of ads themselves.

rvz 23d ago

Just remember it is the same ex-Meta employees who are now at OpenAI adding Ad features into ChatGPT. Why? Because they are saving humanity. /s Facebook tracks you outside of their own website for the same reason, and now ChatGPT does the same for the sake of...Ads. I told you so. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996936

atoav 23d ago

Take this with a grain of salt or as a very edgy, polemic take: I think we really need to hold the individuals running ad networks personally liable for the violation of our privacy rights.

the_gipsy 22d ago

Suspiciously sounds like they need an escape out of the profitability lie. /tinfoil-hat

nelsonfigueroa 22d ago

why is OpenAI wasting their efforts on implementing ads if they are apparently close to AGI?

jrflo 22d ago
I would assume the skill set for implementing ads is quite different than the skill set for developing new models, so it’s quite reasonable to expect different teams are working on each
smokel 22d ago
AGI will most likely have told them that this is the cheapest way to become rich.

lambdaone 22d ago

Creepy as fuck. I'm really suprised they don't understand quite how user-hostile this is.

ElProlactin 22d ago
> I'm really suprised they don't understand quite how user-hostile this is. I'm really surprised anyone thinks these companies care.

varenc 22d ago

For browsers that implement strict cookie partitioning, the privacy concern is moot. With this, the cookie jar that's used when chatgpt.com is a 3rd party site is completely separate for the jar used on the 1st party site. So your chatgpt.com account can't be linked to your ad views. Since this has been standard ad tech for awhile, browsers have reacted to this to implement cookie partitioning for exactly these privacy reasons.

ferro_ 22d ago
Modern adtech fingerprints your browser regardless of cookies, so they can still know who you are. The fingerprint consists of a combination of facts about your browser that together uniquely identify it (screen resolution, timezone, installed fonts and browser extensions, OS version, User agent, even GPU with some forms of canvas fingerprinting, etc.) ChatGPT uses fingerprinting too. Cookie isolation isn't relevant, only anti fingerprinting techniques are.

xyst 22d ago

The entire ad tech industry may truly be an intelligence agency front. The lengths they go to track individuals is quite alarming. Much of this information plus a shit ton of other information (ie, LEOs have access to credit reporting) can be bought by governments from the shady data broker networks already. If people still ignorantly claim this isn’t a George Orwellian dystopia …

Andrex 22d ago
> The entire ad tech industry may truly be an intelligence agency front. The lengths they go to track individuals is quite alarming. Never attribute to malice what can be explained as greed. The quiet part you rarely hear is that advertising is a smoke and mirror industry akin to throwing darts at a wall. The idea of "homing darts" that stick the target a percentage more of the time would be very attractive in this analogy. Tech turns advertising from mostly a buckshot spread into something that kinda sounds like something solid and real ("Look, numbers! CTR! CPC! KPI! Our ad product WORKS! Paying customers for your business, guaranteed!") Ad budgets almost never correlate with actual performance.[0] We're all just lying to ourselves that this business model is performing as expected, and I don't think a reckoning is that far off. 0. https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-big-brands-stopped-spending-on-digital-ads-nothing-happened-why/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...
- inetknght 22d ago
  > Never attribute to malice what can be explained as greed. Why attribute to greed when the effects are indistinguishable from malice?

sergiotapia 22d ago

Highly recommend you use Brave Browser and avoid all this nastiness. If you haven't browsed the web in a browser like Chrome recently, you should try it in a VM or something. It's GRIM. The Web is a wasteland and it's gotten worse because ai chatsites are eating their lunch to the ads are even worse than 10 years ago. https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/

duhhhhh1212 22d ago

https://www.pangram.com/history/c3ad864f-2a50-4785-a0ef-71f289ec003f?ucc=t8c6BkzVOh8 https://www.pangram.com/history/c3ad864f-2a50-4785-a0ef-71f2... why not use your own words? If you are gonna ai generate this blog, just post the prompts instead.

handoflixue 22d ago
There's a certain irony in linking to someone else and then saying "use your own words". If we follow that, we get a pretty obvious answer: sometimes someone else can express it better and faster. Most people do not, in fact, want to read raw prompts.
- nicce 22d ago
  > Most people do not, in fact, want to read raw prompts. I also wonder what is the energy consumptiom difference between the prompt and fetching website.
- crmd 22d ago
  It’s misleading to post model output on a blog, especially when the about says > This blog is where I write about what I find. Why not simply include a disclaimer that it was AI model output not his own writing? Because humans don’t like AI writing and the article wouldn’t be featured on as many tech news sites. Hence the sin of omission, the choice to mislead.
- scared_together 22d ago
  Are you referring to the Pangram link? I’d consider that akin to a reference supporting the comment’s point, not a substitute for the comment’s point. > Most people do not, in fact, want to read raw prompts. I wonder if this is really true, and if it will remain true for long. Have you observed someone read another person’s raw prompt? Or observed someone submit both their prompts and their LLM output for review? Personally I’d be curious about the prompts for a lot of top HN articles which are LLM-generated. It would say a lot more about the human operator’s intent and thinking process compared to the LLM output. A coworker who spoke English as a second language once screen shared their Claude session during a code review, and it was interesting that their prompts were all in their native language. The guy wasn’t writing an article, and I didn’t understand the prompt anyway, but I still found it interesting as a glimpse into how he uses LLMs. For this particular article, if the prompt was initially a series of bullet points that wouldn’t be so bad. If there were multiple prompts spent editing and rearranging the article that would be an unusual work by pre-LLM standards. However I’d suggest that instead of dismissing the idea, we could embrace “raw prompts” as a kind of new medium, to cross the divide between pro-LLM and anti-LLM readers.

IceDane 22d ago

Love how there's an extremely lengthy explanation of the oldest way to track people on the internet like this shit hasn't been happening since cookies were created.

threecheese 22d ago

This might help: ``` ||openai.com^$cookie=__obi ``` Does this look right? AdGuard style.

starkeeper 22d ago

Why don't people hate this as much and riot with torches like they do against flock?

riazrizvi 22d ago

I noticed that. I'm getting ads now based on conversations. I'm okay with it. I don't mind relevant ads.

einpoklum 22d ago

No it doesn't, if you: 1. Never register with OpenAI/ChatGPT, and 2. Strongly block ads, e.g. using uBlock Origin + EFF Privacy Badger. Yes, those don't work on Chrome, Edge and other Chromium-based browsers. Also, even then - ChatGPT may be tracking your behavior indirectly through Microsoft's various services and platforms. But we should do our best to undermine mass surveillance and support individual privacy.

snowbeing 22d ago
they both work on Helium, which is Chromium-based!
ghostwords 22d ago
Privacy Badger works in Chrome, etc. (Manifest V3)
- einpoklum 22d ago
  Yes, you're right. But uBlock Origin doesn't.

robots0only 22d ago

This is incredibly sad, with google you can atleast use the argument that search was free (which is still weak IMO). But with OAI collecting indiscriminate data on paying customers is just incredibly sad.

gizmodo59 22d ago
You can pay for whatever Google service and they still collect this data. Same with meta subscription.
- Hnrobert42 22d ago
  With paid services, Google generally does not collect. Or at least you can opt out of collection, email scanning, etc.
mepiethree 22d ago
The ads are the product that people are paying for. “Consumer” AI is currently marketed as agents that book restaurants for you, buy cat food before you run out, organize your travel, etc. etc. These are targeted ads for a particular restaurant, pet store, airline, etc. Some people find this desirable.

arealaccount 22d ago

I thought 3rd party cookies were blocked on like every major browser, since like forever ago. Is Chrome still allowing this?

hurfdurf 22d ago
It's made by an advertising company. Of course it does.
kylecazar 22d ago
Chrome still allows it. Safari and Firefox don't.
ryankrage77 22d ago
I've got Pi-hole and uBlock, use Firefox container tabs to isolate certain sites, and Firefox still reports it blocked over 2800 trackers this month alone. I wonder how many are still getting through.

JKCalhoun 22d ago

I quit ChatGPT maybe 9 months ago. Through with that.

sanghyunp 22d ago

I'm really feeling how important security is in the age of AI. We need to be careful cookie accept.

bcorigliano 22d ago

This is bad. Like really SUPER bad. Firstly, for professional work you want your AI clean of useless context. Secondly, you also want your AI "unbiased". I know unbiased is not a thing, but at least not as grotesquely biased as towards selling you something would be. Thirdly, as many others are saying, the chamber of reflection effect deepens...

Havoc 22d ago

Adtech based companies are evil

jhhh 22d ago

Part of the reason I stopped using facebook is, beyond the content being terrible, it was super creepy that they would show me ads for things I searched for on other sites. I even have facebook in its own container, but it must have some additional tracking available because it would still know that I was searching for exact clothing brands, college apparel, trips, etc. I already saw gemini integrate some information about me into an answer recently and am getting the feeling I won't be using it much longer. I'm not surprised openAI is going to try to make money similarly. Gross.

stingraycharles 22d ago
This is a very common practice called retargeting / behavioral targeting and has existed for about 2 decades at this point. Facebook is hardly the only company that does this. Modern browsers are more strict towards third party cookies, but there are plenty of ways to work around this.
NothingAboutAny 22d ago
I was talking about changing banks with my spouse, the following two weeks I get podcast ads and Samsung TV ads about the bank I mentioned. I use all the usual off the shelf "dont track me" stuff like a pihole and a "resit fingerprinting" Firefox fork and a VPN and everything else. I'm not amazed it still somehow got me, just sad.
saghm 22d ago
I've never worked in adtech (and hopefully never will), but the first idea that would pop into my head for trying to track people who sequestered their cookies like this would be to have the sites who put in the third-party cookies include the IP address. If only one Facebook account is known to log into that IP, you know who it belongs to, even when there's no active login. I imagine that people actively trying to make money off stuff like this would have come up with plenty more ideas than just this one.
- grepfru_it 22d ago
  I made a browser extension that opens every tab to a proxy with a new ip address. I have a /25 at home that will keep my browsing more or less anonymous these days. I have another 200 ip addresses available through my colo, but a non residential address limits a lot of sites

prologic 22d ago

Why must every piece or technology, every software service or cloud "thing"™ devolve into Advertising?! That's it, I'm out. No more ChatGPT for me.

noisy_boy 22d ago
What I'm more interested is in that the entire model is based on us being reduced to walking talking living breathing coin wallets. It's like a planet scale game where the companies are the players and we carry the loot. We use a great chunk of our lifespan to procure the coins and every company is designed to extract as many coins from us as possible. What happens to this game/real world when this model collapses? We can't procure, they can't extract. What then?
- prologic 22d ago
  I agree, precisely. I'm kind of sick and tired of it to be honest. What if we collectively (humanity that is), just quit? What if we all stop playing? (I think you're saying this) -- But seriously. Both OpenAI and every other place (gawd I hope others aren't doing this) need to figure out their business model fast™ and make it a viable business without devolving into this tracking, marketing and advertising bullshit some of us have only seen far too often -- that have driven us away from things like Meta/Fac** and others...

soundworlds 22d ago

I noticed my YouTube recommended searches seeming to change based on what Claude has just recommended me the other day. I do wonder how much of this data is being shared between the companies.

jazzcomputer 22d ago

I'm not really a code person, but would I add these filters to UBlock? ||bzr.openai.com^$third-party ||bzrcdn.openai.com^$third-party

bitwize 22d ago

"Now let me read your mind... Ah, it seems you like Castlevania!"

aitoolcrux 22d ago

[flagged]

rambojohnson 22d ago

who knew this was coming...

jwstillwater 22d ago

I noticed that the link for OAI’s ad pixel documentation itself has a tracking referral header to the author’s site (?ref=buchodi.com). Given the nature of the article, my instinct was that this is actually some next-level humour that totally sniped me. But now I’m not so sure- does OAI even have a kickback program? What would referral attribution even do here?

ambicapter 22d ago
I'm guessing it's more likely their blogging platform automatically appends a referral header to links.
- jwstillwater 22d ago
  Oh, yep. Right you are. Just looked at their platform (Ghost) who uses a gently termed “outgoing link tags” system.

nocturndev55 22d ago

[flagged]

Zaraif13 22d ago

Honestly, the big labs are just making the case for open source stronger every day.

bentt 22d ago

If you liked how Facebook turned out, keep giving OpenAI your time, attention, and data.

wodenokoto 22d ago

I know people use chat bots differently and I get that companies see value in personalization, but to me it is extremely valuable that I can start a chat without context. When researching a topic a chatbot can be quite sensitive to certain wording and those can end up steering definitions. Two context free chats on the same topic can go in very different ways depending on how you word things, but when using the notebook feature in Gemini, where every chat becomes part of the context you completely lose the ability to discover if a topic is vaguely defined or have many definitions.

1e1a 22d ago
I never want my new chats contaminated with information from previous sessions for this exact reason.
abustamam 22d ago
2 context free chats can go in very different ways even with the same words sometimes! I personally like the option to have context free chat or chats with memories. What I dont want is a chat based on memories that I didn't explicitly consent to (ie browsing history etc)
Yhippa 22d ago
My usage of incognito chats using prompts from other sessions has gone way up. I'm tired of it doing the "you're absolutely right" bit for every new piece of information I bring and it completely trying to donate U-turn.
- demibabs 22d ago
  I feel like having any existing context absolutely poisons the ability to go in a different direction. I’m not sure if there’s a good way to fix this.

mamaluigie 22d ago

My favorite part about AI is that it will eventually lead to the destruction of social media when every post and every comment is AI or cant be proven to not be AI generated. People will eventually get tired of watching content and receiving AI brainwash news. I call it AI Fatigue. Social Media is very quickly becoming Social AI Media...

riversandroads 22d ago

> In observed traffic, scraped identity outnumbered advertiser-supplied identity 685 events to 255. This sentence is even more concerning to me. Scraping user input should never be a way of collecting personal data from a website since it can circumvent any website controls without the website’s out the user’s knowledge.

ak4153 22d ago

Another url to block in Pihole

Melatonic 22d ago
What's the domain list ? Skimmed the article but still looking

singularity2001 22d ago

Use "cookie autodelete" plugin!

sinan-faizal 22d ago

wdym? its dangerous and effciant at the same time.