I know people use chat bots differently and I get that companies see value in personalization, but to me it is extremely valuable that I can start a chat without context.
When researching a topic a chatbot can be quite sensitive to certain wording and those can end up steering definitions. Two context free chats on the same topic can go in very different ways depending on how you word things, but when using the notebook feature in Gemini, where every chat becomes part of the context you completely lose the ability to discover if a topic is vaguely defined or have many definitions.
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.
Part of the reason I stopped using facebook is, beyond the content being terrible, it was super creepy that they would show me ads for things I searched for on other sites. I even have facebook in its own container, but it must have some additional tracking available because it would still know that I was searching for exact clothing brands, college apparel, trips, etc. I already saw gemini integrate some information about me into an answer recently and am getting the feeling I won't be using it much longer. I'm not surprised openAI is going to try to make money similarly. Gross.
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.
I noticed that the link for OAI’s ad pixel documentation itself has a tracking referral header to the author’s site (?ref=buchodi.com). Given the nature of the article, my instinct was that this is actually some next-level humour that totally sniped me. But now I’m not so sure- does OAI even have a kickback program? What would referral attribution even do here?
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.
My favorite part about AI is that it will eventually lead to the destruction of social media when every post and every comment is AI or cant be proven to not be AI generated. People will eventually get tired of watching content and receiving AI brainwash news. I call it AI Fatigue. Social Media is very quickly becoming Social AI Media...
> In observed traffic, scraped identity outnumbered advertiser-supplied identity 685 events to 255.
This sentence is even more concerning to me. Scraping user input should never be a way of collecting personal data from a website since it can circumvent any website controls without the website’s out the user’s knowledge.
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?
This is bad. Like really SUPER bad. Firstly, for professional work you want your AI clean of useless context.
Secondly, you also want your AI "unbiased". I know unbiased is not a thing, but at least not as grotesquely biased as towards selling you something would be.
Thirdly, as many others are saying, the chamber of reflection effect deepens...
I noticed my YouTube recommended searches seeming to change based on what Claude has just recommended me the other day. I do wonder how much of this data is being shared between the companies.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 …
...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.
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 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.
ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector
(buchodi.com)757 points by lmbbuchodi 20 September 2026 | 390 comments
Comments
Some outcomes can be annoying, but the net result is still positive, for the consumers and their data privacy at least.
> 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.
When researching a topic a chatbot can be quite sensitive to certain wording and those can end up steering definitions. Two context free chats on the same topic can go in very different ways depending on how you word things, but when using the notebook feature in Gemini, where every chat becomes part of the context you completely lose the ability to discover if a topic is vaguely defined or have many definitions.
why not use your own words? If you are gonna ai generate this blog, just post the prompts instead.
Firefox, Brave and Safari do. Chrome and Edge do not.
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
according to Bloomberry: https://bloomberry.com/data/chatgpt-ads/
Since this has been standard ad tech for awhile, browsers have reacted to this to implement cookie partitioning for exactly these privacy reasons.
This sentence is even more concerning to me. Scraping user input should never be a way of collecting personal data from a website since it can circumvent any website controls without the website’s out the user’s knowledge.
[1] https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/53/b853e3d4-3186-409d-9c7f-7da...
||bzr.openai.com^$third-party ||bzrcdn.openai.com^$third-party
Doesn’t Gemini or whatever Meta’s agent is do this too?
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.
``` ||openai.com^$cookie=__obi ```
Does this look right? AdGuard style.
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.
https://brave.com/
/tinfoil-hat
I think we really need to hold the individuals running ad networks personally liable for the violation of our privacy rights.
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
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 …
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.
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
THIS is where the regulation needs to start.
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.