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.
"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."
Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.
We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.
People think they're interacting with an "intelligence," when actually they're just getting a maximally optimized Weizenbaum feed. We're living through the sloppification of the human mind.
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.
It turns out that the only way to make money online is ads.
Nobody is going to pay for ChatGPT. They'll just use the ad-infested version, like they do everything else online. Well some people will pay, but not enough to justify the insane amounts of money being poured into it by investors.
A bigger problem is that it will be impossible to know when you are seeing an ad: political groups (or the government, perhaps) will partner with openAI to subtly express different values.
It's still an advertisement, and the underlying marketplace is similar (pay for access to change behavior).
The best uses of AI will be surveillance, propaganda, cyberterrorism, and automated military tech.
Something like it is basically a requirement if you want to see digital ads. Advertisers want to know how many people who saw/clicked their ad went on to make a purchase.
Safari and Firefox should isolate the cookie by default.
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:
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
imagine stealing tons of content from every source on earth and then running ads on it
if a single person did that they'd be sent to prison (rip Aaron) but when a too-big-to-fail industry does it with political campaign contributions, no problem?
well firefox+ublock is still an option for those wise enough not to let unknown javascript with new daily zero-days run on their PC
This is basically what Google did when they pioneered the model of surveillance capitalism (see, e.g., The Age of Surveillance Capitalism).
Google simply provided an index on top of an existing library. Of course, a librarian has no value if he has no books to index over! But it's also worth noting that the Google "librarian" also leveraged the existing "social" structure of the internet: their core contribution (page rank) was a clever, efficient mechanism to extract the latent value in the pre-existing link structure of the internet. This structure (much like the pages themselves) had been curated by actual humans. Undoubtedly page rank was clever, but it was worthless without the existing websites (books) and the existing indexing information (the pre-existing, crowdsourced librarian work). Nonetheless, they successfully monetized it.
AI companies are even worse in the sense that initially Google was still sending traffic to the original webpages. (Until they didn't - https://www.eater.com/2017/9/12/16294380/yelp-google-scrapin...). So yes, the AI companies have even more thoroughly stolen the collective work of humanity than Google did.
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
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.
Whenever I say something like “that’s a cool feature, but to do it you would have to build spyware”, everyone else is just like “the cat is out of the bag ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. (I don’t build spyware, or work on projects that do).
It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons. People see these collaborators from different wars and regimes and think “I’d stand up against the bad guy”… well I’ve got news for you if you build spyware, you are not the person you think you are.
This is the best retort to the bag-escaping cat ever:
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the...
"Nothing is worse to the demise of a society, than people who want to convince you that the cat is out of the bag and will not go back in, while the cat is being violently shook out of the bag at the same time."
Motion to start a political platform for cats in bags. Our message is simple: Put the cat in the bag. Keep the cat in the bag.
> It’s a real tragedy of the commons
Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.
We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.
I'm pretty unhappy with this, but are ChatGPT or Facebook really "the commons"?
People think they're interacting with an "intelligence," when actually they're just getting a maximally optimized Weizenbaum feed. We're living through the sloppification of the human mind.
See e.g., https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-chatbots-are-beco...
MDN lists how different browsers prevent this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/Guides/...
Firefox, Brave and Safari do. Chrome and Edge do not.
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
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.
So basically the same kind of tracking that Facebook, Google, etc have been doing for decades?
Similar, yes, but some people are paying OpenAI to be part of this business model, unlike typical free-riding Google and Facebook users.
This is why you use Firefox that keeps the cookie jars separate (by default, AFAIK). That should prevent this specific implementation, shouldn't it?
There are other ways to track. Containers offer a bit mote protection, but the IP address is still visible (unless VPN).
Yes, it should. But this is also why you use uBlock Origin to block tracker scripts.
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.
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.
Why does ChatGPT need to know that? That should be illegal.
Because it's another surveillance adtech company from SillyCon Valley. Duh.
It turns out that the only way to make money online is ads.
Nobody is going to pay for ChatGPT. They'll just use the ad-infested version, like they do everything else online. Well some people will pay, but not enough to justify the insane amounts of money being poured into it by investors.
Governments will also pay for the tracking capabilities, as they're already doing to Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
Yes, I should have said "ads and tracking" good point.
A bigger problem is that it will be impossible to know when you are seeing an ad: political groups (or the government, perhaps) will partner with openAI to subtly express different values.
It's still an advertisement, and the underlying marketplace is similar (pay for access to change behavior).
The best uses of AI will be surveillance, propaganda, cyberterrorism, and automated military tech.
See, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/technology/iran-china-aut...
Something like it is basically a requirement if you want to see digital ads. Advertisers want to know how many people who saw/clicked their ad went on to make a purchase.
Safari and Firefox should isolate the cookie by default.
>> Why does ChatGPT need to know that? That should be illegal.
> Something like it is basically a requirement if you want to see digital ads.
So to summarize, yes, it should be illegal.
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/
My DNS server (which uses Hagezi's excellent blacklists) returns NXDOMAIN for bzr.openai.com. Serves OpenAI right.
I keep meaning to set this up but haven't. What's the simplest best setup for my own DNS blocker?
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
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.
Hmmm Pihole I guess. Runs on a pi zero (1 or 2 but 2 is better ofc)
For simplicity I highly recommend https://nextdns.io. Supports most devices, and probably most, if not all, well known blacklists.
That is a nice sequence diagram[1]; I like how each endpoint param values are written out and the color distinctions. What tool did you use to create it?
[1] https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/53/b853e3d4-3186-409d-9c7f-7da...
Yuuup. tracking consumers and finding spending correlations to exploit was the entire reason for the "Data Science" and "ML" pushes that got us here.
This has been around since at least April: https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/the-openai-pi...
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.
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.
The defence is simply to delete your cookies?
And now Cloudflare knows that I know what ChatGPT knows!
You are absolutely insane giving any of your thoughts, trolls, speculations to a surveillance website under your login.
They were always going to do surveillance. At least now you get a trendy e-commerce site recommendation too.
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.
...only if and when you allow:
...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.
We. Are. FUCKED.
THIS is where the regulation needs to start.
Regulations won't be set (serious ones, at least) unless there's some risk to those holding power. Which is the opposite in this case: this tracking helps them to take even more control over society and individuals.
No surprise you how
imagine stealing tons of content from every source on earth and then running ads on it
if a single person did that they'd be sent to prison (rip Aaron) but when a too-big-to-fail industry does it with political campaign contributions, no problem?
well firefox+ublock is still an option for those wise enough not to let unknown javascript with new daily zero-days run on their PC
> 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.
This is basically what Google did when they pioneered the model of surveillance capitalism (see, e.g., The Age of Surveillance Capitalism).
Google simply provided an index on top of an existing library. Of course, a librarian has no value if he has no books to index over! But it's also worth noting that the Google "librarian" also leveraged the existing "social" structure of the internet: their core contribution (page rank) was a clever, efficient mechanism to extract the latent value in the pre-existing link structure of the internet. This structure (much like the pages themselves) had been curated by actual humans. Undoubtedly page rank was clever, but it was worthless without the existing websites (books) and the existing indexing information (the pre-existing, crowdsourced librarian work). Nonetheless, they successfully monetized it.
AI companies are even worse in the sense that initially Google was still sending traffic to the original webpages. (Until they didn't - https://www.eater.com/2017/9/12/16294380/yelp-google-scrapin...). So yes, the AI companies have even more thoroughly stolen the collective work of humanity than Google did.
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