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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
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How did the Ad Networks find my search? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] leafperson@hexbear.net 1 points 3 weeks ago

one of the sites you looked at while looking up rambutan? no vpn too, if a page you looked at was served ads by an ad provider they could track you with your ip, as well as assosciating you with a unique fingerprint since you dont have fingerprinting protection. if you only used wikipedia, there is a second rambutan season in some places from november to january, so its possible that they (the rambutan or fruit processing and agricultural industry) are just trying to pick up sales ahead of the season.

if you have sus extensions too.