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?

FoundFootFootage78
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325d

This isn’t a matter for fingerprinting. I haven’t directly visited any sites about rambutan other than Startpage, Duckduckgo, and Wikipedia.

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11d

deleted by creator

Use duckduckgo.com to search “restaurants near me”

Unless they use a complex system to look up geolocation for all queries and forward an approximate version of that to Bing, then Bing is getting IP addresses and search terms.

deleted by creator

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