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User Privacy

2 GoKawiil briefs on this topic

LinkedIn secures court order against ProAPIs and Netswift over data scraping

A California federal judge finalized a settlement requiring ProAPIs and Netswift to stop mass-scraping LinkedIn user data, halt sales or transfers of that data, cease using fake accounts to access the platform, and delete previously scraped information. LinkedIn had sued the companies and their CEO last October, accusing them of running millions of fake accounts to continuously harvest profile, company and school data as well as user posts and comments. ProAPIs, which describes itself as a data pipeline platform, said it has agreed to a consent judgment and denies offering tools to scrape LinkedIn.

OpenAI's ChatGPT ad system links your browsing on other sites to your account via '__obi' cookie

OpenAI runs an advertising collector at bzr.openai.com that sets a persistent, account-linked cookie called __obi on the openai.com domain. When companies that advertise on ChatGPT embed OpenAI's tracking code on their own websites, that cookie is transmitted back to OpenAI along with details of the page being viewed, including products searched, articles read and purchases made. A security researcher says they reproduced the mechanism on their own device and found it active across 936 advertiser pixels spanning 1,029 hostnames.