Something I discovered when going down this rabbit hole is that if you had that conversation in your house and your visitors have access to your wifi, it may be that they performed the search without you knowing, and your ISP connected that data to you and sold it (as they do).
Location location location.
- User 1 shows an interest in <topic>.
- User 1 visits the same location, for the same period of time, as user 2.
- So I show an ad for <topic> to user 2.
How would your ISP connect that data if every search engine uses HTTPS now, so there's no way for the ISP to see what you were searching for?
DNS lookups are still frequently in the clear, and even if they're not, that just means you're trusting some DNS-over-HTTPS provider. The incentives are perverse.
And of course whoever you are performing your search with, like, oh, an ad company like Google, Meta, or Facebook? They just might use that search data for something.
Exactly. Google or Meta can correlate behavioral data like this. Your ISP cannot do that by intercepting your searches.
I care about accuracy when it comes to privacy conversations. I don't want people wasting their time on theories that aren't true when they should be focusing on the real issues at stake.
For what it's worth, the ISP may not know the search terms entered, but it can see "google.com" followed by "itchybuttcream.net" when people click the first results. The data will grow more granular over time as users click the second or even third result on Google.
On WiFi you control this risk can be mitigated (force DNS to your own server that uses ODoH or similar) but for most people ISPs are still sitting on data gold mines obtained from passively observing DNS.
They can still get the hostname of the server you're connecting to through SNI, and that's far harder to hide. Most sites aren't using eSNI/ECH.
His phone would have to be running a hotspot for any visitors (in many parts of the rural area in my locale, mobile data is it for the internet) but if any visitors were with the same carrier network, visitors could have searched. However it's entirely improbable any of his buddies would be on their phone while they're there unless it was a legit interest. Secondly this is stuff from what I gathered, some of is stuff that no one would really even think exists - it's shit talk speculation that's out past the black stump - no one once they're back to earth is ever going to bother to look up even a small aspect of it.
In his case a realistic answer falls towards loose or sneaky permissions in regard of an app that have slipped through that have allowed a weird conversation to influence suggestions in internet activity later on.
However for more grounded subject matters, the more probable strange coincidences falls to queries and visits to the net being scraped by external API and content (fonts scripts etc) providers. I've no idea how much meaningful info would normally be shared between the site and third party providers that seemingly need to be contacted while a site loads.
That's true. I had to rule that out by only counting instances when my friends and I were alone. If not, or Wifi is open, then who knows.