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?
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.