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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Microsoft serves ads through duckduckgo that could connect the search to your IP perhaps if you clicked one
I’m pretty sure I never clicked on one. And I’ve turned off Firefox link previews too IIRC.
It doesn’t matter if you click on it. The ad space auction is already done.
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.
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.