You’re paying AI companies a monthly subscription fee to be fingerprinted like a parolee.
I got bored and ran uBlock across Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini simultaneously.
Claude:
- Six parallel telemetry pipelines.
- A tracking GIF with 40 browser fingerprint data points baked into the URL, routed through a CDN proxy alias specifically to make it harder to block.
- Intercom running a persistent WebSocket whether you use it or not.
- Honeycomb distributed tracing on a chat UI because apparently your conversation needs the same observability stack as a payments microservice.
ChatGPT:
- proxies telemetry through their own backend to hide the Datadog destination URL from blockers.
- uBlock had to deploy scriptlet injection — actual JS injected into the page to intercept fetch() at the API level — because a network rule wasn’t enough.
- Also ships your usage data to Google Analytics. OpenAI. To Google. You cannot make this up.
- Also runs a proof-of-work challenge before you’re allowed to type anything.
Gemini:
- play.google.com/log getting hammered with your full session behavior, authenticated with three SAPISIDHASH token variants, piped directly into the Google identity supergraph that correlates everything you’ve ever done across every Google product since 2004.
- Also creates a Web App Activity record in your Google account timeline. Also has “ads” in one of the telemetry endpoint subdomains.
When uBlock blocks Gemini’s requests, the JS exceptions bubble up and Gemini dutifully tries to POST the error details back to Google. uBlock blocks that too. The error messages contain the internal codenames for every upsell popup that failed to load.
KETCHUP_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MUSTARD_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MAYO_DISCOVERY_CARD.
Google named their subscription upsell popups after condiments and I found out because their error handler snitched on them.
All three of these products cost money.
One of them is also running ad infrastructure.
Touch grass. Install @ublockorigin
@k3ym0 @ublockorigin Thanks for your analysis, good stuff. Confirms my suspicion that GenAI LLM are a kind of AdTech Surveillance Capitalism on steroids, draining way more data from the victim than ‘traditional’ TechBro corporate eavesdropping.
I suggest to establish digital self defence:
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Use common sense and avoid bullshit products based on stolen data (GenAI LLMs use HUGE amounts of energy and water for … what?). Practice good thinking and figure what you can do on your own, with your brain, and without a lying electric parrot crutch.
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Harden your browser > uBlock Origin, and get to protect your network on DNS level > e. g., with Pi-hole. There, add AI blocklists.
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Get independent, and off TechBro ripoff services and subscription products. Reclaim your digital freedom.
@dazzr @k3ym0 @ublockorigin Join your local library? Some have surprising electronic services.
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Crazy about ChatGPT or then again maybe not.
It’s like a race to see which company can become the most insidious.
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@k3ym0@infosec.exchange @ublockorigin@lemmy.ml are you able to test out the ecosia ai? i haven’t purposely used it yet.
I only use the free models on offer by duck.ai, and do it sparingly and in a self-contained manner. I decided that if those models are not enough for a problem, then I would probably be better off seeking a source with real authority and intelligence. They can track my anonymous private (network and browser) sessions all they want 😎, if they wish to.
(And that annoying non-cross-poster can go fuck itself. I’m deliberately posting this here because of it. So, Mission Accomplished!)
