Who are they?

And then there is @Fordy117 who talks out of his bot.

 

Bots are small programs run by companies for data, They crawl over websites like spiders recording and sending the metadata to whoever launched them, They record your IP and then whoever runs them can send adverts to your web browsing pages or sell the data to others, (simplistic explanation )

 

Hate to be this pedantic, but what you’re describing are tags. Presumably there will also be tags on this site for analytics purposes and to track user activity. I can’t remember if there’s a consent platform on this forum either and I can’t be bothered to check, but they wouldn’t be able to collect personal information post-GDPR without consent. IP address would be a big no for some companies, as it’s often considered personally identifiable information.

Bots don’t track the behaviour of individual users, they do crawl for meta-data though in order to build indexes of the internet.