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submitted 2 days ago by sem to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

Ok, so. Earlier today I was watching the Technology Connections video about how Power is energy over time. In the video he shows a picture of an Anker Solix powerbank to illustrate the concept of energy storage. I've never seen or heard of this product before.

An hour later I'm reading an article on Lemmy, and there is an ad for that same powerbank.

What explains this? Some explanations I can think of:

  1. Random chance.
  2. Google scans YouTube videos for information about what products appear in them, and knows that I watched the video, and that I'm the same person now reading the article. It then gives this information to everyone in the ad-selling marketplace, so the Anker ad company can bid high to show me an ad.
  3. Google is observing what appears on my screen in order to sell this info to advertisers.

I think 2 is most likely given Occam's Razor, but I didn't think Google scanned yt videos like this.

Is there something I'm missing?

I was watching on an Android phone, on Tubular. My browser is IronFox. I'm surprised that Google can follow my activity from one app to the other... this is probably based on IP address, but I wonder what other device fingerprinting tubular and IronFox expose...

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[-] dustyData@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

This is what the big deal about cookies and privacy is all about.

[-] sem 1 points 2 days ago

Yeah I'm just not sure how it has cookies since I used tubular...

[-] algorithmae@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 days ago

Fingerprinting. If they don't have a cookie, they'll link other information that they have to figure out with pretty decent accuracy who you are

[-] sem 2 points 2 days ago

This must be it. Especially since they have my IP address it must be an easy fingerprint

this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
25 points (100.0% liked)

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