Reasonably Private Browsing

[Nifft]

I want to watch a very stupid video on YouTube. I want to leave no evidence of that for any social media algorithm to associate with my main accounts.

So, what I do is I start up a VPN, then open a Private browser window, and then open the stupid video in that window.

Finally, I close the Private window. Thanks to a browser addon, all site cookies are purged when I close the associated tab(s). This should already happen with Private windows, but sometimes dusting off and nuking the site cookies from orbit is the only way to be sure.


I do the same thing before checking strange items on Amazon.


What evidence am I leaving behind in spite of my ever-so-careful precautions?

Can YouTube hunt me down and recommend more stupid videos based on that one-off? What about my ISP, can they flag me with stupid-video-watcher slow-lane penalties?

What other sites are worth taking such precautions before visiting? What additional precautions could a reasonable person take, weighted towards convenience / ease of use?

[NichG]

If you're passively logged into something on the same machine (Hangouts for example) then when you switch on the VPN, the IP jump could be used to associate you with that VPN provider. And if you do this systematically immediately before going to YouTube a few seconds later, that may be enough to uniquely identify you out of all of the other users of that VPN.

I'd say you've got a 9/10 chance most advertising or social media predictors won't go that deep. But I have seen Kaggle datasets for ad prediction that would contain sufficient information to build one that would (separate tracking of account ID, device ID, and IP address, and timestamp are enough). So it's maybe not completely out of the question.