I have been finding more and more videos being recommended on my homepage which I search about even though my privacy paths I follow seem good enough. So this is how it goes:

  • I come across a term I don’t know on a Lemmy post.
  • I open my browser, Cromite which has been set to priv.au, a searx instance, as the default search engine.
  • Search the word and don’t even open any links to know, just reading the meaning of this term out from the subtexts present on search results.
  • And then I open YouTube and scroll a bit on homepage to find a video on that term.

This has happened to me twice in past few days and I am not understanding which service of mine is giving it away. To add more about my setup, I’m on mobile btw, using FUTO keyboard and using Duckduckgo VPN which blocks cross-app tracking. My mobile lemmy client is Voyager. I don’t even interact with the post containing that term. I just open it up, read the post and the comments. No upvoting no commenting.

Who’s the culprit here?

  • tehn00bi@lemmy.world
    9·
    1 day ago

    I had something crazy like this happen recently. A friend of mine sent me a photo to my personal phone of an expensive liquor. The very next day on my work computer, on my work network, YouTube suggested a short video about the same expensive liquor that I had never looked anything up about previously.

    How the hell a photo from on device managed to track me like that was impressive. The algorithm is watching us.

    • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      My best guess would be your friend is being thoroughly tracked and they know who he semt the data to and they have a basic mapping of you.

      • tehn00bi@lemmy.world
        1·
        23 hours ago

        Still impressive, I only use YouTube for music at work, be pretty hard in my mind to link my Google account to my work computer that is on a corporate VPN that is out of a data center like 500 miles away.