AIBU to warn data sharing means your posts here are not anonymous

Blocking cookies isn’t going to stop targeted ads. Advertisers track you via email address so if you make a post on mumsnet the advertisers will know that email address is used on a particular device and will still show targeted ads on that device based on what you posted on that account. They’re also going to use your IP address.

if you don’t want to see targeted ads on facebook you can turn them off directly and ask for general ones. If you don’t want your mumsnet posts to result in targeted ads anywhere then you need to use a burner email and a VPN when you post.

It doesn’t mean anyone knows it was me, Julie Smith from Lancaster posting though, or that could in any way be actually tracked to me.

Exactly. Posts being scraped or reposted or whatever has been going on for years. Advanced search lets you look at other posts by that user. But what you can't do is see the real life identities behind those posters. If you CHOOSE to write very very identifiable stories - I am the third of six sisters living in a small Welsh town, my mother is the local magistrate and my father is the vicar, I recently won an Olympic silver medal for judo - then obviously that makes you identifiable. More fool you if you do that.

Deeply worrying.

Surely that’s obvious, though. Anything you put on MN is openly available across the whole world and anyone and anything can use it, and that’ll include those AI stories.

Well it depends what you mean by anonymous.

Of course my device sees everything I post to MN, and cookies etc might mean this is then used to feed ads to me on other websites.

It doesn’t mean anyone knows it was me, Julie Smith from Lancaster posting though, or that could in any way be actually tracked to me.

It could just be, this device spent a disproportionate amount of time on a thread that mentioned cancer multiple times, so cancer related ads are likely to be of interest.

Have you googled anything to do with the personal situation?

is it not more likely AI firms are trawling public online spaces and using the information to generate content? Rather than MN explicitly sharing?

That is shocking. Thanks for sharing.

Unless you pay for MN your data is collected and shared, they do the pay or consent model like a lot of media outlets now. But they do it very badly because it looks like you’re able to decline everything.