This is so meta… Yesterday I tooted about finishing Snowden's book, and today YouTube is *suddenly* recommending me an interview with him. This never happened before, for any of the topics I toot here…
The only thing that changed, of course, is that a few days ago I started cross-posting my toots to Twitter. This is just a tad beyond my willingness to believe coincidences :-) Hey, #surveillancecapitalism, go F yourself!
(Considering shutting down cross-posting.)
On a purely technical note, I'm not logged into Twitter pretty much ever, and Firefox won't let my YouTube cookies to be read by Twitter and vice versa. Which means that there is some database somewhere holding a relationship between my Twitter account and my YouTube account, made probably ages ago, which I can't make disappear.
Mastodon is quite transparent (meaning near-zero privacy) so a surveillance giant might have linked your account here with your identity in other sites.
@jcast that's unlikely, I think. There's no standard way of associating a Mastodon account's public data with any other account, there's only guessing. Guessing means either low-quality results, or expensive statistical algorithms to compensate for that. I can't imagine any of the ad-tech companies would bother, given the number of users here (not even mentioning their general aversion to advertising.)
I give you that data brokers probably would not go to that extent, even if the purpose of gathering data is more than just advertising.
However I doubt any there is any internet space that is not subject to surveillance. e.g. Google goes to great extents to get the tiniest bits of personal data. Even scraping Bluetooth contents while mapping.
But yes regarding your case more likely would be some Google 'partner' connecting the dots with twitter before anything else.
Server run by the main developers of the project 
It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!
@jcast ... but mainly I don't think so because it never happened before, but has happened immediately after I connected with Twitter.