Yes, it does.

Any covert, involuntary, automatic surveillance of a person for any reason whatsoever should have a court order and legal authority behind it - it's gross and exposes the target to vulnerabilities they're not cognizant of.

For telemetry tracking user behavior to be useful at all, it's got to be associated with a user. The idea of telemetry anonymization is marketing speak for "we obfuscated it, we know deanonymization is trivial, but people are stupid, especially regulators."

Any anonymization done is sufficiently obfuscated such that corporate asses get covered in the case of any regulatory investigation. There's no legitimate, mathematically valid anonymization of user data that you could do without destroying the information that you're trying to get in the first place through these tools. This means that any aggregation of user data useful to a malicious actor will inevitably be compromised - the second Posthog or Amplitude become a desirable target, they'll get pwned and breached, and much handwringing will be done, and there will be no recourse or recompense for damages done.

The only strategy to prevent the dissemination of surveillance data is not to collect it in the first place. It should be illegal to collect the data without voluntary, user initiated participation, and any information collected should be ephemeral with regular inspection to ensure compliance. Any violation of user privacy should result in crippling fines, something like 5% of the value of the company per user per day of violation - if you can't responsibly manage the data, you shouldn't be collecting it.

This means all the automatic continuous development a/b testing intrusive corner cutting corporate bullshit would have to stop. Continually leaking surveillance data to malicious actors year over year with no repercussions has thoroughly demonstrated that people cannot be trusted with safekeeping data.

I will build and use my own automation if I need to, based on products that don't covertly, involuntarily, ignorantly surveil their users, without even being aware of potential for harm, and I'll continue to point it out when it shows up in random projects and products, because it's wrong and it should stop.

We should stop embracing the things that enshittify the world, and stop sacrificing things like "other people's privacy" for convenience or profit.

  Keep in mind, extensions can update themselves at any time

You’d be surprised. It describes all the extensions I use.

> These Captchas are really bad at detecting bots and really good at falsely labelling humans as bots.

As a human it feels that way to you. I suspect their false-positive rate is very low.

Of course, you may well be right that you get pinged more because of your style of browsing, which sux.

source: I work in a team that uses this kind of bot detection and yes, it works. And yes we do our best to keep false positives down

Back when I was playing Call of Duty 4, I got routinely accused of cheating because some people didn't think it was possible to click the mouse button as fast as I did.

To them it looked like I had some auto-trigger bot or Xbox controller.

I did in fact just have a good mouse and a quick finger.

I wasn't thinking primarily about tracking and ads here either, when it comes to B2B automation. What I meant was e.g. shops automatically scrapping competing stores on a continued basis, to adjust their own prices - a modern version of the old "send your employees incognito to the nearby stores and have them secretly note down prices". Then you also have comparison-shopping (pricing aggregators) sites that are after the same data, too.

And then of course there's automated reviews (reading and writing), trying to improve your standing and/or sabotage competition. There's all kinds of more or less legit business intelligence happening, etc. Then there's wholesale copying of sites (or just their data) for SEO content farms, and... I could go on.

Point being, it's not the people who want to streamline their own work, make access more convenient for themselves, etc. that are the badly-behaving actors and reasons for anti-bot defenses.

> If you have a sales funnel, as in you take orders and ship something to a customer, consumer or business, I almost guarantee you that you can request an API, if the company you want to purchase from is large enough. They'll probably give you the API access for free, or as part of a signup fee and give you access to discounts. Sometimes that API might be an email, or a monthly Excel dump, but it's an API.

The problem from a POV of a regular users like me is, I'm not in this for business directly; the services I use are either too small to bother providing me special APIs, or I am too small for them to care. All I need is to streamline my access patterns to services I already use, perhaps consolidate it with other services (that's what MCP is doing, with LLM being the glue), but otherwise not doing anything disruptive to their operations. And I'm denied that, because... Bots Bad, AI Bad, Also Pay Us For Privilege?

> When we're talking site that purely survive on tracking users and reselling their data, then yes, they aren't going to give you API access. Some sites, like Reddit does offer it I think, but the price is going to be insane, reflecting their unwillingness to interact with users in this way.

Reddit is an interesting case because the changes to their API and 3rd-party client policies happened recently, and clearly in response to the rise of LLMs. A lot of companies suddenly realized the vast troves of user-generated content they host are valuable beyond just building marketing profiles, and now they try to lock it all up in order to extort rent for it.

Believe me. It's not there yet.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, the benchmark scores are indeed higher, but in my personal experience, LLMs make as many mistakes as they did before, still too unreliable to use for cases where you actually need a factually correct answer.