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?
Do any extensions have permission to view your browsing data? You can check by opening the extension manager, clicking the extension and clicking the ‘permissions and data’ tab. I would suspect 5 and 6 the most, 1 might be suspect too. Those extensions by nature would need such permissions to some extent.
AdGuard, ProtonPass, TamperMonkey, Time Tracker, and 10ten have those permissions. The others don’t. I don’t think any of these extensions would be able to function without these permissions.