You Refused Marketing. You Got an Ad Cookie Anyway.
A cookie named __obi is the only OpenAI identifier configured with SameSite=None, which is the setting a browser needs before it will send that cookie from somebody else's website. A researcher reproduced the handshake on his own phone and decoded 932 tokens: every one of them recorded the consent decision as analytics_allowed.
The Search Engine You Point at Yourself
Adam Tauber wrote Searx, then decided the metasearch idea was the wrong shape and built a local index of the pages he had already read. The comments on his Hacker News thread explain why Chrome deleted the same feature in 2013.
The First Personal Agent Most People Meet Will Be Meta's
Meta just shipped a personal AI agent called Muse straight into WhatsApp, for billions of users, with a genuinely unusual security design: a dedicated cloud VM, a separate Sentinel agent that approves every trip to the internet, and credentials the agent can use but never see. The Hacker News thread found the real question anyway - none of that tells you whose goals it optimizes once it starts spending your money.
The Fingerprint Hiding in Your Pixels
Microsoft's Paint and Photos stamp AI-generated images with an invisible, server-issued GUID - even when the image was generated on your own machine. Your prompt leaves the device either way.