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?
It could be stylometry. Small behavioral things you do can be used to track you. Have you tried doing this on a computer with Kloak (to hide keyboard fingerprints), local LLMs (to hide linguistic fingerprints) etc.
My guess is some android shenanigans. They go to great lengths to track you.
People called me crazy when I said that the phone was listening through the microphone to track your conversations, until they actually admitted they were doing precisely that.
Android may be doing whatever to track you.
Do you have a source to placate people who say phones don’t listen to your conversation through the microphone when you don’t expect them to ?
I’ve seen rebuttals that this was an advertising firm embellishing capabilities to sell themselves, which…maybe. But I have too many anecdotal experiences to believe that.
Last month, my wife and I talked about how we hate Morgan Wallen. Never even typed his name until this post. And yet, after the discussion, she had IG sponsored posts for his out of state concert and Alexa had ads for him on Amazon music. Both within 2 days of the conversation.
I threw out the Alexa, increased Pinhole block lists, and we just leave our phones in another room in airplane mode for some topics.
To anyone who ventures this far, enjoy this relevant Simpsons reference
Third party cookies?
this same thing that happens to me and i’ve tried using different computers and different phones and all using privacy respecting apps.
i’ve since concluded that it’s probably server side tracking using the analytics that 3rd party sites employ that allow “anonymized” data to be shared w google.
i can’t wait to get my de-googled phone.
The only way to escape from that is using a degoogled phone and non proprietary apps/software.
If you’re on mobile, are you using Gboard or the like?
I mentioned in the post that I’m using privacy respecting FUTO keyboard
I had something crazy like this happen recently. A friend of mine sent me a photo to my personal phone of an expensive liquor. The very next day on my work computer, on my work network, YouTube suggested a short video about the same expensive liquor that I had never looked anything up about previously.
How the hell a photo from on device managed to track me like that was impressive. The algorithm is watching us.
My best guess would be your friend is being thoroughly tracked and they know who he semt the data to and they have a basic mapping of you.
Are you using the same account for youtube on your work and phone?
No, I can’t sign in on my work computer.
So YouTube/Google has somehow linked your personal phone activity to your YouTube at work even though work YouTube has no sign in?
It would appear so. Again, it was the most dramatic case of random coincidence or incredibly good association algorithm.
This is the photo sent to me
This is what YouTube suggested to me the very next day
Perhaps you have a ‘leak’ in your isolation methods. Might also be happening to me but I so rarely use YouTube (signed in or otherwise) I can’t see m share relevant experiences.
Maybe Play Services, if you are on stock Android? They are basically a tracking framework, providing some useful features (like payment), which the de-facto only IDE for Android apps (made by Google) bundles/recommends the libraries for.
Dunno. I just use a private window in firefox and have never had this issue.
I’m on mobile btw
Android? You’ll never know what the thing is actually doing.
The other possible scenario is just correlations between your interests and what’s topical. A vague interest in privacy narrows things down considerably. Interest in the term may be statistically correlated with a number of other things that you didn’t think about.
Think of Google as a set of signals.
Every time you search, you’re sending it a signal that you’re interested in a subject.
Google Analytics is embedded in lots of sites. Each time you visit, it sends them back a signal. If you click on one of the ads on the google site, or on any of the millions of sites with embedded google ads, it sends back a signal. If you use Android, each time you change location, make a call, or click on an app, that’s a signal.
When using Nest, or Google Home, or Assistant, that’s another signal. If you use Google Maps , Google Auto, shopping, photos, drive, translate, image search, gmail, all the office apps, and Gemini. Bingo, a signal.
If you follow a link in any of the above, shared by someone else. A signal.
You don’t need to be logged-in. All is needed is an association of that signal with an ‘abstract user’ which represents you across many systems, devices, and applications.
You can turn off tracking, or tighten privacy settings, or go private. All they need is a loose combination of factors (aka fingerprint) to match your previous actions with your devices, user accounts, or signals.
When you get on Youtube, you’re at the tail end of a massive amount of historical data accumulated over time and attached to you. The algorithm just returns a best prediction of what matches that trail. And what you click on and how much of it you watch or skip. Yup, another signal.
And no, none of us can opt out. The same is true for Facebook/Meta, and any other embeddable service, powered by ads.
You can go private, turn off javascript, use alternate browsers, or go back to a flip-phone. Sorry, it doesn’t make a difference. Not any more.
There are ways to successfully circumvent Google’s tracking methods. It’s all based on how much you care about being tracked and how much convenience you’re willing to give up.
No need to click on ads to be tracked successfully. You’ll get fingerprinted any way.
you can also think of it as a series of pipes
Couldn’t this simply be a case of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon?
No it’s not. I can’t really prove it but I just know when Baader–Meinhof phenomenon happens. This is a case of Youtube tracking me because a video on such topics, surrounding that terms, can’t really just happen on my feed, twice.
Did you notice that lately it’s happen more frequently?
These things happens to me too, and the frequency have measurably increase in this last year.
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.
Ok I just downloaded…now I need to learn what it is.
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!
Just a random guess is the term on your clipboard?
No, it’s not.
