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How did the Ad Networks find my search?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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Privacy
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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.