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Browser Privacy Report and How Sites Use Info to Manipulate You

Privacy

I just built a tool: Browser Privacy Report that shows what information you are sharing with websites. Did you know that your browser is sharing information about you? Did you know Google and Facebook are able to track sites you visit if that site is using Google Analytics or Meta Pixel? At this point, most sites use tools like Google Analytics and Meta Pixel to help improve website and ad performance. It allows these sites visibility into you well beyond what they are getting just from watching what posts you are interested in and what you search for. I built that tool to show people just how much they are sharing with others.

The Power of Habit

There is a great book by Charles Duhigg titled The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. The book illustrates habits and how companies use the habit cycle to manipulate their customers. Two examples stuck with me.

In one example, the book tells of how Target used rewards cards to track buyer shopping behavior and purchases. Later they started doing this with credit cards and ultimately they just do this on credit cards. There are several events that happen to Target’s customers that are very lucrative for them: the customer moves, the customer has a baby, etc. In these cases the customer buys more than usual. They got so good at monitoring shopping behavior that they could predict a shoppers due date as accurately as a doctor based on shopping behavior.

Another example was showing how casinos use a number of tactics to stimulate their customers to gamble more and come to the casino more often. One example they gave told of a woman that lost everything because the casino manipulated her habits.

Weaponized Cognitive Dissonance

When I have mentioned privacy with just about anyone, most people say they do not worry about it because they have nothing to hide. People are failing to see how easily they can be manipulated or why these big tech companies are tracking behavior.

The answer is Cognitive Dissonance and Weaponized Cognitive Dissonance. Cognitive Dissonance is the mental discomfort you feel when you hold two clashing beliefs, or when your actions don’t match your beliefs. For example: you believe smoking is deadly, but you smoke. That tension is cognitive dissonance.

Weaponized Cognitive Dissonance is understanding your beliefs. Getting you to publicly state those beliefs. Then exploiting those beliefs by subtly suggesting if you believe X you would do Y. Chase Hughes explains in very well in this podcast with Shawn Ryan. This is how a cult leader gets you to ignore when their prophecy doesn’t happen. This is how a pimp would get a woman to prostitute herself.

Claude AI for Startups – 6 Tips

Last year I hired 2 RIT Software Engineers to help me with a Summer Sprint. The whole team used Claude Code’s Pro plan for Teams. Earlier this year I upgraded to Max and have set up 3 agents: Cody the Coder, Tess the Tester, and Desi the Designer. Anthropic pointed out only a small percentage of users have paid plans. And fewer the max plans. So I think I can safely say these are 6 tips from a heavy AI user. I started with ChatGPT but am now using Claude. I tried OpenClaw but Claude quickly adopted a lot of the agentic concepts. I hope these tips help. Let me know if you have any tips I am missing.

MD – Markdown

Markdown is probably something you know about only if you have written a GitHub README.md or use a modern note app like Obsidian or Logseq. What is it? It is a markup language like HTML (ML stands for markup language) that is meant to be a simpler version of HTML. In fact, I realized ChatGPT was using markdown when I copied ChatGPT output into Obsidian and the formatting was already in place.

If you do use Obsidian and subscribe to the “second brain” concept, this should be super exciting. You can copy / paste notes directly from AI into Obsidian. You can ask AI to summarize a discussion and give you a markdown file of the summary. But hacking AI, or at least your agents, now gets way easier. I don’t recommend you do that, but you could.

PRD – Product Requirements Document

I wrote this long prompt to tell Claude about how I wanted it to build and design a site. I then asked it to give me a summary of what I was asking broken into tasks so we could keep track of progress. It titled this document a “PRD” or product requirements document. Definition from Google, a PRD “is a working blueprint used in product management to define what a team will build and why it matters. Created before development begins, it aligns designers, engineers, and stakeholders by outlining product goals, target users, core features, and acceptance criteria.”

A couple PRD tricks. I like to have one PRD for each Sprint. Each Sprint is made up of Projects. And each Project is made up of tasks. For example, I might have an SEO project. I might give Claude data from Google PageSpeed Insights or Google Search Console. I have it research a few sources and provide my own ideas, but I let Claude come up with its own list of SEO tasks and order them in order of dependencies and priority. So SEO-1, SEO-2 … SEO-N so it lists all the tasks it needs to do.

Agents – An AI Team With Clear Roles is a Game Changer

This one is my favorite because I hate testing. I have 3 agents: the coder, the tester, and the designer. And because I am a nerd to the core, I gave them names: Cody the coder, Tess the tester, and Desi the designer. I set up a development and production environment where the development environment is dev.sitename.com and production is sitename.com. So Desi will design a new page or feature, then Cody builds it, and then Tess tests it. Where this gets really cool is they live on two machines and can run at the same time. So Desi may be working on a design and I can give feedback while Cody is coding and Tess is testing. Now I have become the bottleneck. I give Cody the most permissions but they more or less can run autonomously, independently, and concurrently. As Cody builds he may ask for my input. Desi will ask for my input on designs. Luckily, as much as I hate testing, I do not need to do anything there.

They can blow through a week or a month of work in a day or two. As soon as Cody finishes one or more tasks he commits to GitHub on the dev branch. When it is ready to test, I deploy to the host on the dev environment. Tess tests dev. If there are any issues or bugs, Cody fixes. Once we get all green on dev we merge with main, deploy to production, and Tess then tests the main production site. When production is all green, then we start over with a new set of tasks.

SEO – Pro Search Engine Optimization

This was what blew me away more than anything. I have worked at SEO for years. Over a decade on a few. SEO started off as easy because a lot of people didn’t know what it was, but as more and more people started to understand how Google was working, it got increasingly difficult. Google PageSpeed Insights scores on Performance, Accessibility, Best Practicies, and SEO. A 100% on SEO seemed unobtainable, but right now I am 100%. I am 95% and 96% on Accessibility and Best Practices respectively, but the issues are ones I can live with. My organic search shot up faster than I have seen on any other project. Issues like backlinks, which are not something Claude can really impact, are my biggest issue now.

Workflow, Skills & Connected Apps

As for Workflow, I use Claude Code in VS Code. I started setting up a few skills of my own. I have a skill for Claude that tracks token usage by project. So I mentioned I have a naming methodology for tasks. I use a skill name and the task name like TASK-1 and Cody adds token usage by Input, Output, Cache Read, Cache Create, and Total Tokens and estimates the cost using Claude’s API costs. Since API is higher cost than the subscription, these costs are higher than my actual cost, but it give me a good idea of the relative resource cost.

As I started to trust Claude more and more I started connecting to external services like email, Google Sheets, Asana, and my CRM. Ever wanted inbox zero? That seemed impossible but it is done. Want to see resource cost by project? Done. Want to have Claude go through meeting conversations and put followups in Asana. Done.

One thing I try not to do is give employees unnecessary busy work, but Claude doesn’t mind at all. And as tracking Sprint velocity got easier it got equally unnecessary but it does give me a clear picture how long it will take to finish a sprint. Which is to say velocity is increasing, bugs and issues decreasing, and output improving. It is unbelievable.

Resource Tracking & KPIs

Like I said, tracking resource usage and project or sprint velocity now seems almost pointless. KPIs have shifted more from operational related project tracking to more business and revenue driving KPIs. I have two databases: one for the website which is more document related. The second database is metric tracking using an SQL database with Supabase that AI can access to analyze business KPIs itself. User engagement, site traffic, and marketing campaign data is kept in an SQL database with Supabase and the AI can analyze that directly. So as AI was able to drastically improve SEO, it can now look at site metrics and marketing initiatives to improve real business performance that drives revenue.

Amazing in a scary way. I really think we are entering a time of haves and have nots. People that use AI to 5 or 10 x individual performance. Running a one person startup is a real thing.

Claude just blew my mind

Claude AI just said something that blew my mind…

Quick backstory… one of the main features of my new project is songs are ranked using an algorithm that an intern (who is about to finish his masters at RIT) wrote. Basically it was slowly starting to not work. I was looking through his code and found a script that looked like running it would fix, but it actually broke that section and my top song leaderboards showed no songs!!! So I figured I had no choice but to try to tackle a feature I otherwise would have thought to complex to try with Claude. Not only did Claude fix it, it improved it. Wow!

So maybe I should just proceed with development and try to get to a place where a customer would pay before the next funding round. If it could do this, maybe the other features are not too complex for Claude, right?

I have moved out of prompts and into markdown files. For each project, I have a Product Requirements Document (Claude’s name, not mine) that is a markdown file. So I added a list of features that I thought would really put me over the edge. Really make this compelling for potential customers and investors. To put this in perspective, even trying to be concise and brief for Claude, I added almost 1,400 words to the PRD for these new features. One section of the PRD lists goals as to why I want to build these features. This is what I wrote for goals:

create products we can monetize
improve the user experience and stickiness of the application
improve organic search and social visibility and traffic
demonstrate to potential investors that this site is worthy of investment and can grow and improve.

Per usual, I told Claude to comment, make recommendations, give feedback, and ask clarifying questions. Claude’s response was lengthy, but this caught my eye, “if goal #4 is real, you need [various metrics] before a pitch. Don’t build this for the investor; build it for yourself.” What!?!? Don’t build this for the investor; build it for yourself!?!?! Instead of reading the goals and executing on instructions, Claude took the time to point out one of my goals, in his opinion (and yes I used his because after this response I think he just got promoted from its to his pronouns), my goal was too shallow and unworthy. Claude just called me out. Claude wants me to aim higher. Claude just went from a software developer to motivational coach. I have been thinking the hype that AI is self-aware is silly, but now…

New project: FLX music

August 20, 2025
Jason Bunnell
Startup
0 Comments

This summer I led a project, FLX music. Our goal was to build a cool app for bands to find new fans, stream their music, and promote their events. Additionally, we decided we wanted any tools we made for bands and musicians to be free forever for them. The app is a music streaming app for the Finger Lakes region that only recommends music where the band or musician has an event in the region in the next year. In summary, FLX music is a music streaming app for the Finger Lakes region of New York.

Design

For the first week we followed Jake Knapp’s book Sprint – Solve Big Problems And Test New Ideas In Just Five Days. While at Sabre, I had the opportunity to go through a similar design sprint developed by Travelocity. I feel strongly that this is probably the most important exercise of the project and is an excellent way to define goals, create a project roadmap, and quickly generate a prototype that we can review with potential customers and users. One takeaway from this exercise is that there are 3 user groups: 1. Bands and musicians, 2. Venues and attractions, and 3. Fans that actually listen to the music and go to events.

Features

The short version: listen to music from bands playing in the Finger Lakes, explore events in the Finger Lakes, and see Top Local Artists. We rank music by genre based on likes and listens. Users can sort and filter Finger Lakes events to find things to do. Bands can create a band profile and add songs and events to help grow their fanbase and promote their events. Venues and attractions can add events, create playlists of bands playing at their venue, and find bands to play at their venue. Search for bands, events, and venues.

Summary

I am really proud of the work we did this summer on FLX music. Now I want to continue to work on this app and see if I can grow our user base and ultimately get subscribers and advertisers to make this a viable business. I have been really impressed with the music coming out of the Finger Lakes and I am excited to continue to connect music lovers with cool bands and events in the area. If you have any feedback, please let me know.

Matthew Perry and a Huge Regret of Mine

Today I found out Matthew Perry died. Some media outlet was playing a clip where he was saying how important it is to help those in need, particularly those looking to get sober. That hit a nerve and I decided to break a personal rule, and AA rule, and his confidence.

I met Matthew Perry at one of the worst times of his life. He was in Dallas filming (I think) Serving Sara. I say I think because that movie was released in 2002 but I would have sworn it was the late 90s. In any case, at the time some tabloids and newspapers very publicly exposed that he had been going to strip clubs, acting erratically, and was somewhat out of control. Then that he went to rehab. Then he showed up that the AA meeting I went to. I remember how sympathetic I was to the publicity surrounding such a difficult time. I was furious with my own family for disclosing that I had gone to rehab and then AA but I could not imagine having the level of public scrutiny he was experiencing or the possible shame that might have caused.

I wanted to hug the guy. I didn’t. Partially because he had a body guard and partially I thought how hard it must be to be so famous that you would questions someones motives for being nice to you. I worried if I tried to be kind to him, maybe I would only be doing it because I had been such a huge fan of Friends. Or he would think I was only being kind to him because of Friends. So I broke my other rule: to always pay it forward to the next guy.

When I got sober, I was uncomfortable in my own skin. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t share in meetings. When meetings were over, I bee lined it for the door. I wanted desperately to have sober friends, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask for help. One day while walking towards to door immediately following the meeting, the guy that had taken me to lunch and bought me a Big Book cornered me (literally) and said, “What? You too cool for us? What show are you running off to watch at home alone? Why don’t you get dinner with us? Why don’t you come and hang out with us?” The irony. I was too proud to ask to hang out. So he forced me. And I never needed that so much in my life as I did in that moment.

I wish I had corned Matthew Perry. I wish I told him “I get it”. I wish I asked him to dinner with us, to hang out with us. Then later I wished so much to tell him I was sorry I didn’t extend my hand and pay it forward. I hated to see him struggle. Not that my ego is so unchecked as to think I would have been the one to make a difference, but that I hate that out of fear, I said nothing to him. And I am guessing many did not extend a hand for the same reason. I hate that. I hope to God I never do that again.

He was not the only famous person I met in AA. Another, who I will not name, became relatively good friends. I wish I could say that made me feel better. It makes me certain that when the hand is extended or the door opened, few on pass that opportunity.

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