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]

When has the EU mandated encryption backdoors?

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.

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

Seeing some legitimate executive accountability would be lovely in this day and age, but even fines going into the billions of euros are still just the cost of doing business in a ridiculously lucrative space. That they also happen to dominate by oligopoly.

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.

Could you define (or link) to what "Weizenbaum feed" means/references? Too obscure for me but I'm interested. Thanks.

humorously, my regular iPhone on a residential home network failed the cloudflare AI bot detection and i can’t read that article

What's the old quote from WW2?

  I couldn't help but notice how each successive headline reporting our glorious victories seemed to draw closer to Tokyo.

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.

Or both, you know. An intelligence that also spies on you

Why is it so black and white?

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."

> 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.

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"?

> 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.

> 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.

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.

If you can't be bothered writing it, why should I be bothered reading it?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Hello Pot, I would like to introduce you to Kettle.

This would work for an ad shown on ChatGPT and then clicked on (or in the ChatGPT app).

But it would not give ChatGPT information about which other sites are visited.

Of course there would be non-cookie options like fingerprinting (also via IP) that would allow tracking non-the-less.

So you might be talking with OpenAI about your marriage problems and then based on the IP the OpenAI ad network would start showing ads for divorce lawyers on unrelated sites you browse to that display ads.

The solution to that would be using a VPN.

>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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Containers don’t offer a benefit over normal browsing for this, Firefox already blocks and isolates third party cookies.

For simplicity I highly recommend https://nextdns.io. Supports most devices, and probably most, if not all, well known blacklists.

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).

Hmmm Pihole I guess. Runs on a pi zero (1 or 2 but 2 is better ofc)

Because at least one mechanism of tracking still exists we should just give up on blocking any of them?

>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

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

But politics is when people who feel differently try to do something about it

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.