Does devRant sell user's data? I have a feeling that something I recently posted here invoked a series of ads I'm now receiving everywhere.
I may (and want to) be wrong about this.

Not likely but there is always someone to steal your data

I don't think so but devRant is open on the internet so bots could scrape your posts? 🤷‍♂️

@heyheni other than my nickname (which is unique), how can they find out my identity without the email address?

Now I feel so insecure

Network request on the website are made towards:
devrant.com
ajax.googleapis.com
carbonads.com
img.devrant.com (cloudfront.net)
facebook.net
fbcdn.net
google-analytics.com

I don't think that @dfox is selling your data intentionally anyway, but embedding any content from ad-tech can have side effects.

Other than that however, the usual suspects would be your keyboard (if on android), other on-device spyware, ISP and VPN provider (if used).

What the hell??? It sends requests to Google Analytics, Google APIs, CarbonAds, Facebook CDN... This is inferior.
I'm moving to devRantron.

@AtuM Yeah, it seems these are just least of evils. I was exaggerating on empty place 😂

Wouldn't it be fucked up if someones boss was also browsing devrant and found one of his employees rant about that specific meeting? It's a little bit funny and bucket full of sad

@AshesOfTheSun That’s one of devRant’s fundamental flaws: you can’t really share it with coworkers if any of them are rant-worthy.

Also, take care what you post, and anonymize as necessary.

Anyway, I sincerely doubt dfox sells any data. However, like others said, devRant is open to the wonder Internet and allows scraping, and those that scrape social media likely do username correlations. That’s likely what happened.

However, your own devices spy on you, too, be it Windows, Android (especially with the gboard keyboard), Google assistant, Chrome, keyloggers like viruses (or like Grammarly), plus your ISP and absolutely any VPNs (save perhaps a few).

The ad and analytics providers also a spy to varying degrees. And Facebook absolutely does, especially if you’re logged in. Or if you’re not.

Welcome to the wonderful dystopian web, full of pretty much only curated content, and where everything is a camera ready to sell you out.

It’s probably your keyboard if you use google keyboard. They track typed words.

DevRant is written in PHP and I don’t think anyone is masochistic enough to write an ad tracker in PHP.

I really don’t care about my data being collected. if they know I enjoy watching super mario porn on YouTube so be it. I don’t care

@hashedram if anyone would have to created it will be crap because you know how shit php is.

@Root <- well she is not wrong tho.

@TeachMeCode I thought you might search for deer?

@AtuM grammarly , a new pleasant keylogger...

@TeachMeCode It’s not about porn. It’s about politics and products and mental health and psychology, and predicting your behavior, and learning how to manipulate it. All without you even realizing.

@TeachMeCode oh so you don't care? Amazing! Today is my lucky Day! 😃
Hand me over your primary email login and your credit card info. As you stated you don't care how your personal data is used you should be ok with that. If not you're a dirty liar.

@Root that's why the data is expensive?

@johnmelodyme Yes. With enough, you can predict what people will buy/need and when, what they are interested in, what their mental health is, what they care about, what their triggers are, their likely behaviors in the future (buying a house, starting a family, switching jobs, criminal activity, new job, signs of depression/anxiety/diseases, etc.), what the person’s views are, their politics, and further: how to influence all of these.

Insanely valuable for large companies, political groups, and governments. Absolutely valuable for governments as it gives them unimaginable levels of monitoring and control.

@Root well that's sounds like Facebook and Google , etc big tech company.

@Root that's complete surveillances.

@johnmelodyme and ad tracking companies, and those who buy data, etc. And they all freely share it with the NSA/etc. Some are freely sharing it with the Iranian, Chinese, etc. governments now, too.

Scary world.

@Root from my experience in China , when I worked in Ningbo , they actually inspect my social media which including my WeChat , weibo, Douyin, Billibilli for any possible anti china propaganda posts.

From that I know that Chinese government are stalking us even though we are not their citizen.

It is no surprise soon the EU will follow this method and sparkles a little bit of "freedom of speech " which make no sense.

While in malaysia , my country, our government stalk where we go. We have the app called MySejahtera which the location are on 24/7.

Yeap scary world. Somehow we will realise that we no longer treated as human but statistics.

@heyheni depends on the data lol, of course I wouldn’t want my credit card info leaked

@TeachMeCode or you preferred debit card leak instead 😈😈😈🤣

@johnmelodyme And yet people call me a conspiracy theorist. 🤦🏻‍♀️

@Root people call you conspiracy theorist when they overwhelmed and cant accept the fact government are not as good as they seem.

Most of the cast consider as conspiracy theories UNTIL it is proven with fact.

@Root well those people who call you conspiracy theorist have to stay in malaysia or China for one week.

They will realised that not just calls are somehow recorded.

We absolutely do not sell any user data and never have.

And yes, to be clear, we do use Google Analytics on our website like pretty much every other website, but that’s really the extent of our third-party integrations.

@TeachMeCode of course