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How did the Ad Networks find my search?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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Privacy
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I'm pretty sure I never clicked on one. And I've turned off Firefox link previews too IIRC.
It doesn't matter if you click on it. The ad space auction is already done.
Apparently Startpage and Duckduckgo use contextual advertising (rather than targeted advertising) so the advertisers on an unrelated website shouldn't know I was looking up rambutan.
If you do searches on DDG, which is powered by Bing, you get responses that are relevant to your IP-based location, which means something about your IP is being passed to Bing aka Microsoft. That's how.