Finally, something decent to come out of the surveillance state.

I tried that, Windows FOR SOME FUCKING REASON keeps opening new holes in the firewall anyway.

I’m not really interested in maximum privacy, at least right now. I’m slowly moving there though.

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.

Except the only sites I visited where I mentioned rambutan were Duckduckgo, Startpage, and Wikipedia.

This isn’t a matter for fingerprinting. I haven’t directly visited any sites about rambutan other than Startpage, Duckduckgo, and Wikipedia.

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.

And it also could not. Either way it wasn’t active at the time so it’s down to whether my ISP is selling it.

1. I have Freetube installed but I found no reason to really use it when I have this browser extension and adblock (though I don’t have one enabled for YouTube so I have no idea why I’m not seeing ads). I can probably do what Remove YouTube Suggestions does with Tampermonkey or Violentmonkey anyway so I might switch.
2. Didn’t realize Tampermonkey wasn’t open source. I’ll look into it when I can eventually be bothered.
3. I can’t use a Passkey on my phone. GrapheneOS doesn’t support passkeys.
4. Piracy isn’t worth the hassle to me, though it’s not like Crunchyroll has been much better lately.

Firefox only stores the time of my most recent visit so I don’t have that information anymore, so let’s just assume I went to YouTube immediately afterwards.

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.

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.

I use AdGuard rather than uBlock Origin for adblocking, because it allows me to opt-in and only block ads when they are aggressive enough to be annoying. But I’ve not been trying to minimize fingerprinting. The issue is just that everything I used in this instance came with either a tacit or explicit promise not to track me and I don’t know which is lying.

Other extensions I use are:

1. Remove YouTube Suggestions
2. 10ten Japanese Reader (just now disabled)
3. Tampermonkey
4. Proton Pass (because my government services require 2FA, but only offer an official government app that uses the play integrity API, or a Passkey which is only natively supported on Windows or Mac)
5. Time Tracker - Web Habit Builder
6. Improve Crunchyroll (which seems to have stopped Crunchyroll from forcefully dropping my resolution to 144p).
7. SteamDB (just now disabled)

September 2025

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.

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.

I don’t think Wikipedia is a likely culprit. I haven’t heard anything about them selling data.

I’m pretty sure I never clicked on one. And I’ve turned off Firefox link previews too IIRC.

As far as I can remember, only the Wikipedia one.

Looking it up my ISP isn’t exactly trustworthy, but there have been no clear allegations. I’d say it’s the most likely cause if not my Firefox extensions.

EDIT: I just got another theory, Cloudflare, I’ll add it to the list.