Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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How did the Ad Networks find my search? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So a bit ago I got an add for "canned rambutan". I had looked up Rambutan a few days prior after hearing it mentioned 10 hours into the video game Baby Steps. I wasn't using a VPN at the time and I didn't have fingerprinting protections active but I only mentioned it to a few sources (according to my browser history) all of which generally are implied to be private.

Which of these do you think is the reason the ad networks know?

Wikipedia
Startpage Search
Duckduckgo Search
My ISP
Firefox
My Firefox Extensions
Kubuntu
CachyOS
The omnipotent algorithm connecting my mentions of Baby Steps with my progress through the game.
Does this only make sense if my browser history is incomplete?
Maybe I was using DNS over HTTPS via Cloudflare at the time of my search.

Any guesses as to where the weak link is?

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[–] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I'm pretty sure I never clicked on one. And I've turned off Firefox link previews too IIRC.

[–] ivn@jlai.lu 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

It doesn't matter if you click on it. The ad space auction is already done.

[–] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Apparently Startpage and Duckduckgo use contextual advertising (rather than targeted advertising) so the advertisers on an unrelated website shouldn't know I was looking up rambutan.

[–] lefthandeddude@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

If you do searches on DDG, which is powered by Bing, you get responses that are relevant to your IP-based location, which means something about your IP is being passed to Bing aka Microsoft. That's how.