Another issue is that controllers generally do not need to change their behavior before the final lawful decision which can take a lot of time to go through the court system, especially if it needs CJEU referral. And once the decision comes in force they can often make small changes and restart the whole process.

Also another issue is that DPAs do not often initiate the investigations themselves (unless breach is involved), they only happen at the request of data subjects and not that many people bother making complaints or follow them up. Just yesterday I had to follow up with 9 page reply to the controller's response to the DPA inquiry.

Additionally ePD and GDPR enforcement is sometimes split between different agencies. In those cases GDPR agency tends to wait for ePD case to be solved before investigating the GDPR aspects, often because the ePD consent validity will affects e.g. GDPR legal basis analysis.

It’s an ongoing fight for sure but it’s some fight at least.

[though you are not wrong that encryption backdoors are a backwards step on individuals rights to privacy]

Why is it so black and white?

  I couldn't help but notice how each successive headline reporting our glorious victories seemed to draw closer to Tokyo.

Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this "scam"/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence.

Being highly convinving is one of the things on that list.

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the...

"Nothing is worse to the demise of a society, than people who want to convince you that the cat is out of the bag and will not go back in, while the cat is being violently shook out of the bag at the same time."

Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.

We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.

When I ask people about things like this, I hear a lot of "If I don't build it, someone else will"

My goal isn't just to refuse to build this stuff, it is actively to resist the people who are.

I don't have much influence though

But it would not give ChatGPT information about which other sites are visited.

Of course there would be non-cookie options like fingerprinting (also via IP) that would allow tracking non-the-less.

So you might be talking with OpenAI about your marriage problems and then based on the IP the OpenAI ad network would start showing ads for divorce lawyers on unrelated sites you browse to that display ads.

The solution to that would be using a VPN.

The fear over blocking third party cookies breaking stuff is severely overstated. I have it disabled by default and I don't think I've ever seen any website breakages. The most is office365 nagging me to click on links so it can authenticate across domains.

And the focus on cookies only is also intentionally misleading. Tracking is not just cookies. Chrome will track you in Incognito mode.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-third-party-cookies-chro...

This disgusts me more than any of their recent news. There needs to be a lot more pressure on them to phase this out.

Maybe this article will be the small snowball that gets that started...

> This blog is where I write about what I find.

Why not simply include a disclaimer that it was AI model output not his own writing? Because humans don’t like AI writing and the article wouldn’t be featured on as many tech news sites. Hence the sin of omission, the choice to mislead.

> Most people do not, in fact, want to read raw prompts.

I wonder if this is really true, and if it will remain true for long. Have you observed someone read another person’s raw prompt? Or observed someone submit both their prompts and their LLM output for review?

Personally I’d be curious about the prompts for a lot of top HN articles which are LLM-generated. It would say a lot more about the human operator’s intent and thinking process compared to the LLM output.

A coworker who spoke English as a second language once screen shared their Claude session during a code review, and it was interesting that their prompts were all in their native language. The guy wasn’t writing an article, and I didn’t understand the prompt anyway, but I still found it interesting as a glimpse into how he uses LLMs.

For this particular article, if the prompt was initially a series of bullet points that wouldn’t be so bad. If there were multiple prompts spent editing and rearranging the article that would be an unusual work by pre-LLM standards. However I’d suggest that instead of dismissing the idea, we could embrace “raw prompts” as a kind of new medium, to cross the divide between pro-LLM and anti-LLM readers.

I also wonder what is the energy consumptiom difference between the prompt and fetching website.

Note to folks who have this same thought (seems like many given other comments). Why are you on this site if you aren't here for human-created content? If you want AI generated blogs/posts there are plenty of sites like linkedin, twitter, chatgpt, and claude that will give you meaningless content with a press of a button.

This sentence is way too much detail and it's literally the first thing you read. I can pick apart most of the sentences in the article. Another one:

> Across 932 decoded sync tokens, 736 carried subject_type: account_user and 196 carried anonymous

This sentence is pointless. What matters to proving that "It works when you are logged out" is to show that the identifier is stable. Why does the reader care about the actual counts.

AI has a tendency to do this which makes AI generated text a lot harder to read. The raw prompts likely don't have the specific websites and cookie names because that's not relevant to the reader or writer for that matter - it's a footnote at best.

> let the votes speak for that.

The comment you are replying to got a fair number of votes too… Having somebody run a Pangram check saves n people the trouble of doing the same.