silent_speech

It made the news recently that Wickr (Amazon owned E2EE chat app) is full of illegal imagery.

I read about this on my LinkedIn feed then decided to search for "Wickr" there to see who else was talking about this. The search returned dozens of spam messages offering drugs in Asia and the US with information to contact on Wickr for price.

I reported these drug spam posts to LinkedIn - which is supposedly an anonymous report.

Next day I got a flood of reports on my own comments (nothing to do with that topic), so many I didn't bother to appeal as I had other things to do. Few hours later my account was down.

Seems that for retaliation the drug network decided to find me out and use their accounts to subvert LinkedIn's policy and ensure I can't stop their spam. They have new spam up now while my account is gone.

No good deed goes unpunished I guess.

I have an old laptop loaded with an offline copy of Wikipedia (Kiwix). It has no networking whatsoever and hasn't seen an USB device for more than a year. I use it daily to read as I would a physical encyclopedia and I take some notes on it that never leave (or so I guessed).

I also have a Pixel phone and accounts on all major social media. So I have noticed recently that after reading on that laptop about cookies, I get ads of cookie brands. Cats lead to cat food ads. Vitamins lead to supplement ads. Companies and businesses lead to job offer ads from the respective ones. It is very blatant and immediate.

Is data leaking from that system to advertisers? How?