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OpenAI's __obi ad cookie follows you from ChatGPT to advertiser sites, tying your browsing to your account

OpenAI's __obi ad cookie follows you from ChatGPT to advertiser sites, tying your browsing to your account

  • OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a __obi cookie scoped to .openai.com with SameSite=None, Secure and a one-year Max-Age, the only OpenAI identifier configured to be sent on cross-site requests, so it travels from ordinary websites back to OpenAI and links that browsing to a ChatGPT account.
  • Any advertiser buying ads on ChatGPT installs OpenAI's measurement pixel; on the reporter's phone one __obi value was sent to OpenAI from 12 commercial sites under 13 pixel IDs, including Chewy, Wayfair, Eventbrite and HelloFresh, and every request was accepted with 202.
  • The pixel SDK also harvests identity from the advertiser's page. Scraped values outnumbered advertiser-supplied ones 685 to 255, email, phone and name are SHA-256 hashed before sending, while country, region, city and postal code go in the clear.
  • Of 932 decoded sync tokens, 736 carried subject_type account_user and 196 were anonymous; the anonymous device subject is as stable as the account one and persisted at least 27 days, so the tracking works when signed out.
  • The observed traffic covered 936 advertiser pixels across 1,029 hostnames, and automatic matching was enabled for 638 of 881 pixels with a known setting, including every credit and lending advertiser seen.

Hacker News opinions

So this is basically the same tracking Facebook and Google have run for decades. Nothing new under the sun.

Similar, sure, but people are paying OpenAI a subscription while it runs this on them. Google and Facebook users at least freeloaded for it.

I opened an AI service site in incognito once because I did not want it in my search history. Third-party cookies were blocked and it still fired a tracker at Meta, which matched my home IP to my Facebook account and flooded my feed with ads for it. What defense does a normal person have? None.

The fact that others do the same does not make this excusable. That is just whataboutism.

OpenAI hired a pile of ex-Meta and ex-Google people for exactly this, so nobody should be surprised.

The line that sums it up for me: the mechanism is standard adtech, what has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product. I have known this for a while and it still feels gross every time I read the details.

Whenever I say a feature would require building spyware, everyone just shrugs. If you build spyware for a living, you are not the person you think you are.

People think they are talking to an intelligence when they are getting a maximally optimized Weizenbaum feed. We are living through the sloppification of the human mind.

This has been around since at least April, the ad exchange press was writing about it then.

Steal every piece of content on earth, then run ads on it. One person doing that goes to prison, an entire industry doing it with lobbying money is fine.

Google built the same business on top of the existing web and at least sent traffic back to the pages at first. The AI companies took the same collective work and gave nothing back.

Firefox keeps cookie jars separate per container by default, which should block this specific implementation. But the IP address is still visible unless you are on a VPN.

uBlock Origin is the other half of it. I finally put uBlock Origin Lite on iOS Safari after years of not bothering, should have done it much sooner.

My DNS server uses Hagezi's blacklists and returns NXDOMAIN for bzr.openai.com. Serves them right.

Why does ChatGPT need to know any of this? It should be illegal. Attribution is a core part of any ads system, which is the whole reason they built it.

Is the entire defense here just deleting your cookies?

That sequence diagram in the post is nicely done, every endpoint parameter written out and color coded. Does anyone know what tool makes those?

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