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?
You’ll need to provide all the sites you visited immediately after each of the ones you searched. Your
originheader will give that info away freely. So if it’s in the query parameters of the URL, then you go to Facebook, it’s as easy as{k: v for k, v in (pair.split("=", 1) for pair in response.headers["origin"].split("?", 1)[-1].split("&"))}Firefox only stores the time of my most recent visit so I don’t have that information anymore, so let’s just assume I went to YouTube immediately afterwards.