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

393 points - today at 3:18 PM

Source

Comments

duhhhhh1212 today at 8:48 PM
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.

thih9 today at 6:34 PM
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.

mavsman today at 5:05 PM
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.

luke5441 today at 5:31 PM
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.

varenc today at 8:35 PM
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.

1saadcodes today at 5:50 PM
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

exceptione today at 5:23 PM
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.
Legend2440 today at 5:03 PM
So basically the same kind of tracking that Facebook, Google, etc have been doing for decades?
nelsonfigueroa today at 8:20 PM
why is OpenAI wasting their efforts on implementing ads if they are apparently close to AGI?
sigzero today at 5:27 PM
Why does ChatGPT need to know that? That should be illegal.
lambdaone today at 8:28 PM
Incredibly creepy. I'm amazed they don't have any idea quite how user-hostile this is, or the reception it would receive.
tgsovlerkhgsel today at 5:19 PM
This is why you use Firefox that keeps the cookie jars separate (by default, AFAIK). That should prevent this specific implementation, shouldn't it?
AznHisoka today at 5:08 PM
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/

amelius today at 8:26 PM
AI is really becoming a god that sees/knows everything. Just what we needed ...
Avshalom today at 5:04 PM
Yuuup. tracking consumers and finding spending correlations to exploit was the entire reason for the "Data Science" and "ML" pushes that got us here.
emerongi today at 5:36 PM
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.
sergiotapia today at 8:46 PM
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/

DevKoala today at 6:17 PM
> 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?

Jazgot today at 6:27 PM
Time to start having separate container for every domain. I'm pretty sure this should be possible in Firefox.
hbcondo714 today at 5:12 PM
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...

armchairhacker today at 7:10 PM
The ideal personal assistant should know what you do on other websites, and your personal files etc. But it should be local.
drnick1 today at 5:24 PM
My DNS server (which uses Hagezi's excellent blacklists) returns NXDOMAIN for bzr.openai.com. Serves OpenAI right.
BCM43 today at 5:07 PM
This has been around since at least April: https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/the-openai-pi...
lambdaone today at 8:27 PM
Creepy as fuck. I'm really suprised they don't understand quite how user-hostile this is.
the_gipsy today at 8:11 PM
Suspiciously sounds like they need an escape out of the profitability lie.

/tinfoil-hat

bilsbie today at 6:31 PM
Is this how random sites know what I search for?
Razengan today at 7:17 PM
Does blocking `bzr.openai.com` on the DNS server prevent this? (without breaking ChatGPT)
leo_proger today at 6:38 PM
crazy dude. chatgpt can't even see the full page content when searching the web and you're saying this...
jfasi today at 5:41 PM
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the reflexive ā€œad tracking badā€ 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 naĆÆve, 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 ā€œwe are improving the experience for our users,ā€ 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 ā€œlook at how good our conversion rates are,ā€œ and then they’re going to build an explicit ad platform that enshittifies their chat products.

gruez today at 6:17 PM
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.

retube today at 5:28 PM
The defence is simply to delete your cookies?
swe_dima today at 6:07 PM
Was considering buying ads on ChatGPT. A damning thing is that yours audience then are users too cheap to buy a sub...
atoav today at 7:41 PM
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.

xyst today at 8:43 PM
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 …

deleted today at 5:40 PM
shevy-java today at 6:31 PM
SpyGPT.
vcryan today at 6:13 PM
Well, I don't go to website anymore... so ha! ;)
craniumjello today at 5:08 PM
No surprise you how
ck2 today at 5:07 PM
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

measurablefunc today at 5:39 PM
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.
hagbard_c today at 5:34 PM
...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.

startup_zombie_ today at 6:09 PM
[dead]
rvz today at 7:16 PM
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

jamienk today at 5:21 PM
We. Are. FUCKED.

THIS is where the regulation needs to start.

2198276 today at 5:16 PM

  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.
kats today at 7:12 PM
Oh, the lifechanging technology isn't completely 100% free? They sell ads just like a bajillion other things?