Which has nothing to do with the stalking of the adtech industry, unless you are suggesting that the EU might sell access to the keys to the likes of OpenAI?
[though you are not wrong that encryption backdoors are a backwards step on individuals rights to privacy]
Malicious compliance (or as it more usually is malicious noncompliance that has not been sufficiently punished so the slimy buggers feel free to continue) is something you should blame the stalkers of adtech for, more than the EU. The legislators could perhaps have made the definitions less wavy, and been harder with enforcement, but that doesn't make it all their fault.
Is it now? Are Alphabet, Microsoft, Yahoo and Meta's platforms and call-home products illegal for exposure to EU residents? i.e. Google, Bing, Facebook, WhatsApp, MS Office and such? Are these companies' C-suite people wanted, to be charged massive breaches of user privacy?
> 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?
If it's any consolation, all other non-California regions in the world lack the privacy protections enjoyed in Switzerland and the EU, but they still don't produce many unicorn startups nor have fantastic salaries for coders.
> 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.
Sure, but plenty of companies want to operate within the EU. While I feel any legislation will only affect their operations within the EU, having the infrastructure to operate under privacy laws there means it'll be easier if/when other jurisdictions follow suit
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
Copypasting my reply to someone who made almost exactly the same point in a sibling comment earlier:
Which has nothing to do with the stalking of the adtech industry, unless you are suggesting that the EU might sell access to the keys to the likes of OpenAI [though you are not wrong that encryption backdoors are a backwards step on individuals rights to privacy]
Things could be worse. It could be like most of the US where there are both no (or at least far fewer) protections against invasive behaviour of private companies and the government actively trying to backdoor private comms.
And the sane world is fighting the EU BS with geo blocking.
Just set up your user agent to work as you wish, isn't that simpler than have unelected, technologic dumb bureaucrats writing laws that are complex and don't solve the issue?
I don't know if the destruction of many industries in the EU--including manufacturing--can be called an annoyance.
All the EU bureaucrats can do is regulate, that's why it's so difficult to do business in the EU and that's why there is so little innovation over here. If Microsoft and Apple were started in the EU they would've been shut down within a week because you can't operate from a garage.
I guess that every once in a while this might have a positive outcome for consumers, a broken clock is right twice a day.
I'm sure Microsoft and Apple could have been able to afford a cheap office given their parents' generous financing.
And, regarding the original topic, we wouldn't have many of these privacy issues if the US had not strategically failed to regulate its obnoxious tech monopolies
I don't see how that's relevant? Regulation might have limited some innovation in tech, but gdpr does not affect any of the dying industries. That's more from competition with china, companies with too much interest in giving payouts to shareholders than to innovate, and US financial industry buying most of the best players
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.
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.
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.
Having an LLM generate major parts of text that you (whether explicitly or lying by omission) claim as yours is dishonest and plagiarism, and it baffles me that many people just don't seem to mind or see anything problematic about it.
Because I want to read the author's words, not claude's, chatgpt's or grok's.
Note to folks who have this same thought (seems like many given other comments). Why are you on this site if you aren't here for human-created content? If you want AI generated blogs/posts there are plenty of sites like linkedin, twitter, chatgpt, and claude that will give you meaningless content with a press of a button.
Do you constantly want to be reading ai-generated content on this site? If so, why not just stay on chatgpt.com and ask it to generate what hackernews.com would look like today? It's adding to the discussion because I feel like the author broke a social contract by probably putting less effort into writing this than I did reading it.
Having an LLM generate major parts of text that you (implicitly or explicitly) claim as yours is dishonest and plagiarism and should be brought to readers' attention, and it baffles me that many people just don't seem to mind or see anything problematic about it.
Why would you want n people to compute an AI prompt independently instead of reading the output once? And why would that be better?
At least criticise the article on merit and not some 'let me google that for you' high horse. If it's slop it's slop, but let the votes speak for that.
> OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com
This sentence is way too much detail and it's literally the first thing you read. I can pick apart most of the sentences in the article. Another one:
> Across 932 decoded sync tokens, 736 carried subject_type: account_user and 196 carried anonymous
This sentence is pointless. What matters to proving that "It works when you are logged out" is to show that the identifier is stable. Why does the reader care about the actual counts.
AI has a tendency to do this which makes AI generated text a lot harder to read. The raw prompts likely don't have the specific websites and cookie names because that's not relevant to the reader or writer for that matter - it's a footnote at best.
Not everyone would actually send the prompt to an LLM. Some would have the opportunity to see the prompt as its own artifact, devoid of LLM-generated “hallucinations”.
> let the votes speak for that.
The comment you are replying to got a fair number of votes too… Having somebody run a Pangram check saves n people the trouble of doing the same.
People think they're interacting with an "intelligence," when actually they're just getting a maximally optimized Weizenbaum feed. We're living through the sloppification of the human mind.
I couldn't help but notice how each successive headline reporting our glorious victories seemed to draw closer to Tokyo.
Something like that.
Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this "scam"/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence.
Being highly convinving is one of the things on that list.
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.
Your issue is you are defining spyware too broadly. This is not spying on users, but rather 2 companies partnering and sharing data to result in either a better ads system or better understanding on how ads are performing. This is a positive value to society and the commons. Wasting space in a site or app with an ad that won't convert is the true tragedy of the commons. It's a waste of time and money for all parties involved.
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.
That’s not fully protect you.
They still can match short living third party identifiers with their domain cookie or device_id from app.
It is not 1-1 matching but works relatively good with modern itp.
> 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.
>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.
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.
I don’t think there is any consistency in behavior. People react viscerally to the unproven belief that the Facebook app records conversations. They’ll also happily buy big TVs despite the fact they’re very much listening to you and we have solid evidence that it’s for ads or residential proxying. Most people have no idea how ads “follow” you, or how companies can figure out what you talked about by connecting the dots from other user metadata.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Firefox is my daily on desktop, but on mobile it's Safari. I finally got around to installing uBlock Origin Lite on iOS. I used to run the Firefox version on iOS, but that was discontinued long ago, and I never replaced it. I feel like a bit of an idiot for not doing this sooner.
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
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I didn't look at the prose closely enough to check for that, but people wrote inflated explanations of basic things like this all the time pre-LLM. The Wikipedia article doesn't know the specific cookie name, and can't show the results of an experiment verifying that it is in fact being used for ad tracking, or identify specific sites using it in collaboration with OpenAI.
>but people wrote inflated explanations of basic things like this all the time pre-LLM.
And those got a pass because at least you could defend them with some excuse about how it's some budding author trying to hone their writing skills, or trying to improve their understanding by putting pen to paper. Cases where those excuses don't work (think crappy content marketing pieces from random companies) got short shrift as well. Now for all you know, it's just some dude who prompted claude to "write a blog post about openai's ads".
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.
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
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.
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 …
> 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.
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.
>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.
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
...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.
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.
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.
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.
> Some outcomes can be annoying
I'd classify mandatory encryption backdoors as an industry crisis rather than an annoyance.
Which has nothing to do with the stalking of the adtech industry, unless you are suggesting that the EU might sell access to the keys to the likes of OpenAI?
[though you are not wrong that encryption backdoors are a backwards step on individuals rights to privacy]
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When has the EU mandated encryption backdoors?
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> I am once again happy that the EU is fighting practices like these via legislation.
As long as you manage to navigate all the dark patterns and not accidentally give your "informed consent".
Malicious compliance (or as it more usually is malicious noncompliance that has not been sufficiently punished so the slimy buggers feel free to continue) is something you should blame the stalkers of adtech for, more than the EU. The legislators could perhaps have made the definitions less wavy, and been harder with enforcement, but that doesn't make it all their fault.
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Is it now? Are Alphabet, Microsoft, Yahoo and Meta's platforms and call-home products illegal for exposure to EU residents? i.e. Google, Bing, Facebook, WhatsApp, MS Office and such? Are these companies' C-suite people wanted, to be charged massive breaches of user privacy?
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> 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?
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If it's any consolation, all other non-California regions in the world lack the privacy protections enjoyed in Switzerland and the EU, but they still don't produce many unicorn startups nor have fantastic salaries for coders.
> 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.
Sure, but plenty of companies want to operate within the EU. While I feel any legislation will only affect their operations within the EU, having the infrastructure to operate under privacy laws there means it'll be easier if/when other jurisdictions follow suit
> But I'm happy EU does this stuff as well, as it's a really nice vacation spot
With no Flock cameras!
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
Are you equally happy that the EU is attempting to mandate backdoors into technological platforms and outlaw private encrypted communication?
Copypasting my reply to someone who made almost exactly the same point in a sibling comment earlier:
Which has nothing to do with the stalking of the adtech industry, unless you are suggesting that the EU might sell access to the keys to the likes of OpenAI [though you are not wrong that encryption backdoors are a backwards step on individuals rights to privacy]
Things could be worse. It could be like most of the US where there are both no (or at least far fewer) protections against invasive behaviour of private companies and the government actively trying to backdoor private comms.
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And the sane world is fighting the EU BS with geo blocking.
Just set up your user agent to work as you wish, isn't that simpler than have unelected, technologic dumb bureaucrats writing laws that are complex and don't solve the issue?
I don't know if the destruction of many industries in the EU--including manufacturing--can be called an annoyance.
All the EU bureaucrats can do is regulate, that's why it's so difficult to do business in the EU and that's why there is so little innovation over here. If Microsoft and Apple were started in the EU they would've been shut down within a week because you can't operate from a garage.
I guess that every once in a while this might have a positive outcome for consumers, a broken clock is right twice a day.
I'm sure Microsoft and Apple could have been able to afford a cheap office given their parents' generous financing.
And, regarding the original topic, we wouldn't have many of these privacy issues if the US had not strategically failed to regulate its obnoxious tech monopolies
I don't see how that's relevant? Regulation might have limited some innovation in tech, but gdpr does not affect any of the dying industries. That's more from competition with china, companies with too much interest in giving payouts to shareholders than to innovate, and US financial industry buying most of the best players
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.
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.
If you can't be bothered writing it, why should I be bothered reading it?
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.
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.
Having an LLM generate major parts of text that you (whether explicitly or lying by omission) claim as yours is dishonest and plagiarism, and it baffles me that many people just don't seem to mind or see anything problematic about it.
> just post the prompts instead.
Why would anyone want that?
Because I want to read the author's words, not claude's, chatgpt's or grok's.
Note to folks who have this same thought (seems like many given other comments). Why are you on this site if you aren't here for human-created content? If you want AI generated blogs/posts there are plenty of sites like linkedin, twitter, chatgpt, and claude that will give you meaningless content with a press of a button.
How is this adding to the discussion? The post in itself is quite informative.
Do you constantly want to be reading ai-generated content on this site? If so, why not just stay on chatgpt.com and ask it to generate what hackernews.com would look like today? It's adding to the discussion because I feel like the author broke a social contract by probably putting less effort into writing this than I did reading it.
Having an LLM generate major parts of text that you (implicitly or explicitly) claim as yours is dishonest and plagiarism and should be brought to readers' attention, and it baffles me that many people just don't seem to mind or see anything problematic about it.
Why would you want n people to compute an AI prompt independently instead of reading the output once? And why would that be better?
At least criticise the article on merit and not some 'let me google that for you' high horse. If it's slop it's slop, but let the votes speak for that.
> OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com
This sentence is way too much detail and it's literally the first thing you read. I can pick apart most of the sentences in the article. Another one:
> Across 932 decoded sync tokens, 736 carried subject_type: account_user and 196 carried anonymous
This sentence is pointless. What matters to proving that "It works when you are logged out" is to show that the identifier is stable. Why does the reader care about the actual counts.
AI has a tendency to do this which makes AI generated text a lot harder to read. The raw prompts likely don't have the specific websites and cookie names because that's not relevant to the reader or writer for that matter - it's a footnote at best.
Not everyone would actually send the prompt to an LLM. Some would have the opportunity to see the prompt as its own artifact, devoid of LLM-generated “hallucinations”.
> let the votes speak for that.
The comment you are replying to got a fair number of votes too… Having somebody run a Pangram check saves n people the trouble of doing the same.
Why comment if you have nothing good to say?
Hello Pot, I would like to introduce you to Kettle.
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.
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...
Could you define (or link) to what "Weizenbaum feed" means/references? Too obscure for me but I'm interested. Thanks.
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humorously, my regular iPhone on a residential home network failed the cloudflare AI bot detection and i can’t read that article
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What's the old quote from WW2?
Something like that.
Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this "scam"/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence.
Being highly convinving is one of the things on that list.
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Or both, you know. An intelligence that also spies on you
Why is it so black and white?
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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."
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> 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.
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Well, some people care and some don't. The people who care don't get to work on the technology.
I'm pretty unhappy with this, but are ChatGPT or Facebook really "the commons"?
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> 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.
When I ask people about things like this, I hear a lot of "If I don't build it, someone else will"
My goal isn't just to refuse to build this stuff, it is actively to resist the people who are.
I don't have much influence though
Your issue is you are defining spyware too broadly. This is not spying on users, but rather 2 companies partnering and sharing data to result in either a better ads system or better understanding on how ads are performing. This is a positive value to society and the commons. Wasting space in a site or app with an ad that won't convert is the true tragedy of the commons. It's a waste of time and money for all parties involved.
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A lot of the Meta/Google folks jumped ship to Openai/Anthropic. This kind of work is expected
[flagged]
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.
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.
That’s not fully protect you. They still can match short living third party identifiers with their domain cookie or device_id from app. It is not 1-1 matching but works relatively good with modern itp.
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.
>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.
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.
I was going to say, wasn't this supposed to be the default in Chrome by now? But Google reneged on it two years back:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-third-party-cookies-chro...
This disgusts me more than any of their recent news. There needs to be a lot more pressure on them to phase this out.
Maybe this article will be the small snowball that gets that started...
> 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.
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.
Back then I didn't have expectations of privacy, I think. I just didn't have a notion of privacy. I didn't think the internet was hostile, I believe?
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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.
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> Not to mention Facebook is free whereas you pay for a GPT subscription
Recalling the now-old adage: Facebook is only free if your time and privacy are worthless.
I don’t think there is any consistency in behavior. People react viscerally to the unproven belief that the Facebook app records conversations. They’ll also happily buy big TVs despite the fact they’re very much listening to you and we have solid evidence that it’s for ads or residential proxying. Most people have no idea how ads “follow” you, or how companies can figure out what you talked about by connecting the dots from other user metadata.
ChatGPT is also freely available
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.
I noticed that. I'm getting ads now based on conversations. I'm okay with it. I don't mind relevant ads.
So basically the same kind of tracking that Facebook, Google, etc have been doing for decades?
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.
Similar, yes, but some people are paying OpenAI to be part of this business model, unlike typical free-riding Google and Facebook users.
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.
Derogatory "Free-riding users". "Free riding users" should have the same privacy as the paying ones.
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Yes. But there is no surprise given that OpenAI hired lots of ex-Meta and Google employees for that reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
The fact that others do the same doesn’t make any of the cases excusable.
Why does ChatGPT need to know that? That should be illegal.
Something like it is basically a requirement if you want to see digital ads. Advertisers want to know how many people who saw/clicked their ad went on to make a purchase.
Safari and Firefox should isolate the cookie by default.
> Something like it is basically a requirement if you want to see digital ads.
It is not a requirement and no one wants to see ads.
>Safari and Firefox should isolate the cookie by default.
That's what firefox's total cookie protection (enabled by default) does.
> Safari and Firefox should isolate the cookie by default
Doesn't mean you won't be tracked by about 15 other means.
>> 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.
To make the only consumer revenue that will really ever be available.
Remember they once predicted it would be 50% of their income.
This is the only way they get there.
Attribution is a core part of building an ads system.
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.
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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.
This is why you use Firefox that keeps the cookie jars separate (by default, AFAIK). That should prevent this specific implementation, shouldn't it?
Yes, it should. But this is also why you use uBlock Origin to block tracker scripts.
Firefox is my daily on desktop, but on mobile it's Safari. I finally got around to installing uBlock Origin Lite on iOS. I used to run the Firefox version on iOS, but that was discontinued long ago, and I never replaced it. I feel like a bit of an idiot for not doing this sooner.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
> I feel like a bit of an idiot for not doing this sooner.
Don’t beat yourself up, uBlock Origin on iOS is only four months old.
There are other ways to track. Containers offer a bit mote protection, but the IP address is still visible (unless VPN).
Containers don’t offer a benefit over normal browsing for this, Firefox already blocks and isolates third party cookies.
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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/
Yuuup. tracking consumers and finding spending correlations to exploit was the entire reason for the "Data Science" and "ML" pushes that got us here.
why is OpenAI wasting their efforts on implementing ads if they are apparently close to AGI?
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
AGI will most likely have told them that this is the cheapest way to become rich.
This might help:
``` ||openai.com^$cookie=__obi ```
Does this look right? AdGuard style.
Incredibly creepy. I'm amazed they don't have any idea quite how user-hostile this is, or the reception it would receive.
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 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?
Time to start having separate container for every domain. I'm pretty sure this should be possible in Firefox.
Firefox (effectively) already does that by default.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cooki...
Doesn't really matter, they can track you in several ways.
Because at least one mechanism of tracking still exists we should just give up on blocking any of them?
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.
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...
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
Disclaimer: I cut it off after a few minutes because I got impatient. It could have gotten closer if I waited longer.
AI is really becoming a god that sees/knows everything. Just what we needed ...
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.
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).
For simplicity I highly recommend https://nextdns.io. Supports most devices, and probably most, if not all, well known blacklists.
Hmmm Pihole I guess. Runs on a pi zero (1 or 2 but 2 is better ofc)
This has been around since at least April: https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/the-openai-pi...
Why don't people hate this as much and riot with torches like they do against flock?
The ideal personal assistant should know what you do on other websites, and your personal files etc. But it should be local.
Even if I had an actual human person assistant, there would be parts of my life I would want to keep private.
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.
Is this how random sites know what I search for?
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.
Yeah Google benefits you by tracking you and delivering more relevant ads too. Doesn't make it any less creepy.
crazy dude. chatgpt can't even see the full page content when searching the web and you're saying this...
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/
Does blocking `bzr.openai.com` on the DNS server prevent this? (without breaking ChatGPT)
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
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.
> until realizing it's just AI generated
I didn't look at the prose closely enough to check for that, but people wrote inflated explanations of basic things like this all the time pre-LLM. The Wikipedia article doesn't know the specific cookie name, and can't show the results of an experiment verifying that it is in fact being used for ad tracking, or identify specific sites using it in collaboration with OpenAI.
>but people wrote inflated explanations of basic things like this all the time pre-LLM.
And those got a pass because at least you could defend them with some excuse about how it's some budding author trying to hone their writing skills, or trying to improve their understanding by putting pen to paper. Cases where those excuses don't work (think crappy content marketing pieces from random companies) got short shrift as well. Now for all you know, it's just some dude who prompted claude to "write a blog post about openai's ads".
There are specific details about how the mechanism works like the cookie name (__obi) that can help defenders.
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.
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The defence is simply to delete your cookies?
Was considering buying ads on ChatGPT. A damning thing is that yours audience then are users too cheap to buy a sub...
That's a problem with most unsolicited online advertising. Are YouTube ad-watchers any more likely to splurge on your SaaS?
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
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.
Suspiciously sounds like they need an escape out of the profitability lie.
/tinfoil-hat
Creepy as fuck. I'm really suprised they don't understand quite how user-hostile this is.
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.
SpyGPT.
Well, I don't go to website anymore... so ha! ;)
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.
No surprise you how
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 …
> 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-bi...
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.
>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.
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.
It is hilarious that this got downvoted, even when it's entirely factually accurate. I encourage the downvoters to respond to the content.
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
...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.
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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
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.
But politics is when people who feel differently try to do something about it
Any regulation will be geared toward protecting the profits of the AI companies, and not toward consumer protection.
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.
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.
They were always going to do surveillance. At least now you get a trendy e-commerce site recommendation too.
Oh, the lifechanging technology isn't completely 100% free? They sell ads just like a bajillion other things?
ChatGPT is not 100% free in the first place, and this is about tracking and selling your data, not the existence of ads themselves.