Privacy

41763 readers

315 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

How am I being tracked by Youtube? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 days ago by zerozaku@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

50 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 3 days ago

In the sense of okhams razor it's also possible that you're just more sensibilized to the term.

It would be a fun experiment to next time first check YouTube before looking it up elsewhere, just to eliminate the chance that the information vector is before the search.

From there then come various other possibilities (from behaviour based prediction to Lemmy profe linking).

Just to widen the search area!