Out of what you say, probably cloudflare or incomplete history. Have a great day!
well, it would make no fucking difference if you had a vpn on, ALL IT DOES IS MOVE YOUR EXIT POINT. it cannot touch your browser traffic.
frustrates me to bo end the bullshit fucking ads/lies vpn companies peddle
If my exit point is my ISP, and my ISP is selling my data to advertisers (hypothetically), then a VPN would make a difference. That's why I mentioned it.
search data would be difficult to obtain for a service provider. it would require a retargeting campaign or something to extract your search values.
search data is already tls encapsulated at the browser. isp can see your tcp metdata, but not the data.
also.. not the point. sorry
I should've known that but forgot. You're right, my ISP shouldn't be able to see anything but that I visited Wikipedia. They wouldn't know that I searched for rambutan.
A vpn is just another isp, which could also sell your data
I would trust something like Mullvad more than ATT or Verizon to not sell my data, wouldn't you?
**this comment was posted like 6 times because all of the Lemmy instances I've been using have been super weird lately not letting me post comments and stuff so I kept trying and kept trying and then all of them pushed through at once.
Wasn't Mullvad famously raided and found to keep no logs?
I'd sure trust that more than any ISP in UK or USA and I think you would be crazy not to as well.
One has a proven track record, the others undoubtedly do it and have been known to do it and tell you they do it.
It frustrates me to no end that people can't understand that truth.
Even with TOR and shit they say don't do that and I think that's wrong. Sure sure, fingerprinting or whatever. I believe there is a much more tangible risk of your ISP knowing that you are connecting to TOR in the first place especially in countries like UK and USA.
Sure if you lived in Belize or something where it doesn't matter it wouldn't be a big deal but living in those two countries and even like Canada and Germany automatically makes you a target for using it.
Out of those options or a VPN I pay anonymously with Monero or mail cash to I would consider that much, much safer than any ISP.
I encourage you to look up what Snowden said about ATT helping the NSA during Prism which is absolutely still ongoing.
In fact, here you go heres a small part of it https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-att-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-millions/
But sure keep preaching about how VPNs don't do anything and instead trust the companies that have direct interests to the governments they serve to stay in favor and that have your credit card and address on file. That is much more secure!
I didn't say they didn't do anything, bit the lies they peddle about protecting your browsing is shit, browsing is almost universally https now, you're iso can't see shit, except the IP address you're connected to, a VPN just moves your exit point, that's it, you're iso knows you're connected to a VPN also, btw
I didn't say they didn't do anything my rage is against the marketing
It's duckduckgo. Search duckduckgo.com with the term "restaurants near me." You'll often get responses that are close to your IP location.
That couldn't happen unless DDG passes your IP address on to Bing. It's possible they censor part of the IP and only pass part of it to Bing, but probably not.
(Go ahead! Try it!)
Since Bing sells to data brokers, data brokers know your IP is linked to a search for rambutan, even without fingerprinting your browser.
I'm not calling duckduckgo.com a honeypot... I'm also not calling it not a honeypot. But it knows too much for something supposedly private.
Any closed source firefox extension that has access to the browser display could be parsing the texts and selling it and your IP and other identifiers to data brokers. It's part of how these extensions are profitable.
Cloudflare also does highly advanced fingerprinting and has a script called cloudflare insights, so it seems likely that any cloudflare activity is generating marketing data.
How old is that game? Are there other people in your demographic who also play the game, and then searched for the same thing?
September 2025
You say you were not using a vpn. Then the site has your ip and probably has meta/google ads or other shit running on it and links the product with your ip.
This data is added to some data broker/ ad network and you see an ad when you visit a site using this network as you have "signalled" interest in the product by viewing the product page the first time.
Except the only sites I visited where I mentioned rambutan were Duckduckgo, Startpage, and Wikipedia.
I would guess the likely culprits are
Firefox extensions
Search engines
Wikipedia
Other search results you may have opened or pre-loaded (not a default Firefox behaviour)
I don't think Wikipedia is a likely culprit. I haven't heard anything about them selling data.
If the EFF de anonymization tool can de anonymize your browser, then the ad network can too.
Try searching for something with tor browser - no javascript
This isn't a matter for fingerprinting. I haven't directly visited any sites about rambutan other than Startpage, Duckduckgo, and Wikipedia.
It's DDG
how do you know?
Use duckduckgo.com to search "restaurants near me"
Unless they use a complex system to look up geolocation for all queries and forward an approximate version of that to Bing, then Bing is getting IP addresses and search terms.
Have you considered confirmation bias?
It’s rambutan season and you saw an ad for rambutans. You haven’t mentioned that seeing the ad was weird so I gotta assume you see other ads they’re just not related to something that you searched for recently or something you recognize as being related to something you searched for recently.
I don't see many ads, and the ads I do see are never food items. I think this canned rambutan was the first food ad I've seen in years.
I can't even fathom this being a coincidence.
Did you click on any search results?
I found that the Firefox Browser history is often incomplete.
As far as I can remember, only the Wikipedia one.
Any extension could leak this information as well.
Is your default engine something other then the mentioned search engines? The search suggestion feature leaks information too.
I had removed all but Duckduckgo and Startpage from my browser.
My browser extensions are a good angle. If they're selling my data to fund themselves that'd explain some things.
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.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)