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?

  • habitualcynic@lemmy.world
    3·
    20 hours ago

    I’ve seen rebuttals that this was an advertising firm embellishing capabilities to sell themselves, which…maybe. But I have too many anecdotal experiences to believe that.

    Last month, my wife and I talked about how we hate Morgan Wallen. Never even typed his name until this post. And yet, after the discussion, she had IG sponsored posts for his out of state concert and Alexa had ads for him on Amazon music. Both within 2 days of the conversation.

    I threw out the Alexa, increased Pinhole block lists, and we just leave our phones in another room in airplane mode for some topics.