Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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iPhone is listening (self.privacy)

submitted 1 year ago by Telcontar to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Ok I have a question. I'm kinda a noob when it comes to privacy. I'll follow the guides and do the things to try to minimize ad companies selling my data etc.

Some basic stats: I have a Samsung running stock android. My GF has an iPhone. I use brave as my standard browser (I know that's not super popular but I haven't made the move to Firefox yet.) I have DNS level ad blocking on my router cause I hate ads with a passion. She uses safari.

So here's the deal. I was browsing the web looking for gift ideas for Christmas and came across some moccasins I liked. I mentioned to her that I liked them and browsed their website for a few minutes.

About 10 minutes after that, she's checking her Instagram and sees an ad for the exact brand of moccasin I just told her about. Just for kicks, she also checks her Facebook and sees the same ad there (makes sense cause it's the same company).

My question is basically how on earth did she get an ad for something I looked up? And how can we prevent that from happening? It's very very disconcerting to have ads pop up on others' phones right after looking that thing up.

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[–] Vexz@kbin.social 20 points 1 year ago

The first thing that pops up in my mind is your public IPv4. You see, in your home LAN every device uses the same public IPv4 to communicate in the internet. So if one device browses for something like an iPhone and you're being tracked then those ad brokers deliver iPhone ads to this public IPv4 and every device behind this public IPv4 will see those ads. Nobody on the internet knows whether behind this public IPv4 is a single device or a LAN with many devices.