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

Legend2440

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

Avshalom

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

mavsman

To me, this quote just about sums it up: > The mechanism is standard adtech. What has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product. As someone who has been well aware of this mechanism for quite some time, I still feel icky anytime I re-read the details of it. What a time to be alive.

BCM43

This has been around since at least April: https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/the-openai-pi...

ck2

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

craniumjello

No surprise you how

AznHisoka

And the number of websites with ChatGPT ad trackers is on track to be doubled from last month. according to Bloomberry: https://bloomberry.com/data/chatgpt-ads/

hbcondo714

That is a nice sequence diagram[1]; I like how each endpoint param values are written out and the color distinctions. What tool did you use to create it? [1] https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/53/b853e3d4-3186-409d-9c7f-7da...

2198276

Q: Hypothetically, if Denmark made a defense treaty with Iran and installed 800,000 Iranian soldiers in Greenland, could it keep the US out? A: You are describing a fascinating scenario! [produces 100 lines of slop while giving the login to the FBI]. Should I find a website where you can buy the finest used AK-47s? You are absolutely insane giving any of your thoughts, trolls, speculations to a surveillance website under your login.

tgsovlerkhgsel

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

jamienk

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

exceptione

The surveillance economy hits again. The only business model they can think of. Combined with state capture this gives unprecedented power over the Average Joe, who will hand his life, his soul and his vote to Big Brother without a thought.

drnick1

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

sigzero

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

retube

The defence is simply to delete your cookies?

luke5441

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.

hagbard_c

...only if and when you allow: - 3d party cookies - ads and other 'malcontent' ...which you should never do. As to the 3d party cookies there might be some rare exception where those can be useful but ads? Never, ever allow those on any device you use. Block them as if they're the radioactive plague because they are. Fight them on the beaches, fight them on the landing grounds, fight them in the fields and in the streets, fight them in the hills, never surrender . That's ads we're fighting. Maybe the same oration will be relevant in the context of ChatGPT and its brethern, we'll see. For now, ads be gone and keep those chatbots at a leash.

emerongi

https://tinfoil.sh/ - ultimately there is no guarantee that the LLM provider isn’t spying on you, but at least tinfoil claims to be unable to do so.

measurablefunc

Every AI company is also a surveillance company. It's the only way to get all the necessary training data. The fact that they're now also an advertising agency is incidental.

jfasi

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the reflexive “ad tracking bad” that I am most savvy tech practitioners reach for might deserve some reconsideration in this case. The thing about advertising on the web and ad tracking as a practice is that, barring the small matter of ensuring the economic survival of the publisher sites, it is almost always a negative for users. When we consider the marginal benefit of naïve, uninformed-by-surveillance advertising with the present day status quo, we find that in exchange for a complete lack of privacy, we only really receive a marginal improvement in ad quality. Of course, if you (like me) consider all advertising to be a negative on the experience of using the web, it’s an even worse deal. The standard response given by these companies when they bother giving a response is something to the effect of “we are improving the experience for our users,” which obviously the users would disagree with. However, when it comes to OpenAI, they could build a plausible case for this sort of tracking improving the product. If your models know where your internet habits are, the responses that you get could be tuned for both your interest profile and your actual history of interactions/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.