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

#infosec #privacy #selfhosted #foss #surveillance

📢 New Essay:

"What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn't a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking?"

https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing

Remember Graham Granger at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who ripped the "AI art" off the wall and ate it?

yeah, he recorded the whole thing. It ends with the police taking him away.

he got his phone back from them yesterday and put it up.

13/10 art

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk7GownBT_U

- do you want to use google to sign in?
- do you want to add a passkey?
- do you want to add a 2FA token?
- we know you have 2FA but we've sent you an email instead
- this login attempt seems suspicious we've sent you a text about it
- can you click on these buses?
- you failed to click on the buses click on these bicycles instead
- should we save these details for next time?
- do you accept these trackers?
- you can opt out but we've decided it's legitimate interest anyway
- would you like to see a list of our 847 partners we share your data with?
- can we send you desktop notifications?
- can we access your location?
- do you want 10% off for signing up to the mailing list?
- do you want me to translate this page?
- hi I'm your friendly chatbot how can I help?
- oh no you can't buy this, reach out to us for a quote!
- do you want—

I'm tired boss

Tech CEOs: Workers MUST be present in the office. The job simply can not be done remotely.

Also Tech CEOs: Most workers can be replaced by AI. Hosted remotely.