Privacy

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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.

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

submitted 5 days ago by zerozaku@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[–] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 8 points 5 days ago

If this only happened once it may be a coincidence.

If you did in any way visit another page with this term then it is still possible for Google to embed trackers in pages and use your IP and fingerprinting techniques to gather data and use it for recommendations. Note that using a VPN and cromite does not prevent all means of fingerprinting. But if you did not visit any pages other than the search engine then either that privacy-focused search engine is sharing your searches with Google or it was a coincidence.