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?
1·9 hours ago- I have Freetube installed but I found no reason to really use it when I have this browser extension and adblock (though I don’t have one enabled for YouTube so I have no idea why I’m not seeing ads). I can probably do what Remove YouTube Suggestions does with Tampermonkey or Violentmonkey anyway so I might switch.
- Didn’t realize Tampermonkey wasn’t open source. I’ll look into it when I can eventually be bothered.
- I can’t use a Passkey on my phone. GrapheneOS doesn’t support passkeys.
- Piracy isn’t worth the hassle to me, though it’s not like Crunchyroll has been much better lately.