> According to Qurium, TacoLoco is a traffic monetization network that uses deceptive tactics to trick Internet users into enabling "push notifications," a cross-platform browser standard that allows websites to show pop-up messages which appear outside of the browser.
An elderly relative of mine was hit by this a couple years back: his computer's desktop was constantly being spammed with messages on startup, and there was no simple way to turn them all off. It turned out that they were all notifications from web workers that he'd inadvertently allowed at some point prior. (I set his browser to auto-deny notifications so it wouldn't happen again.)
I honestly think desktop notifications in their current form are one of the worst features of the modern web. Sure it's nice to get an email alert but on my experience there's probably a thousand confused old people getting spammed for each person that intentionally enabled it.
What's worse is they look like native OS alerts (on Windows) so when one says "SECURYIRT ALERT!! CALL NOW" it's that much more effective at getting people on the phone with scammers.
Good overviews of the truck https://youtu.be/aEq-vTLimrQ?si=fS-UhjndoWuxwBip
https://youtu.be/1OgN_qctcGs?si=nEysWQHzafRpxfRp