So, you are protected by the GDPR. There are some types of tracking that are just forbidden or very difficult to implement inside the law.

If you want to stop thinking and let companies decide what is the best for you, your problem is not lack of tracking. Trusting that big corporations will have your best interested in mind seems an odd believe to have in this day and age.

The thing about the language in websites is different. Most websites are created to be used locally. So, they conflagrate language, residence, currencies, etc. It has nothing to do with tracking.

Mastodon was my main source of doom-scrolling, but I got sick of the endless stream of posts about US politics and posts about Mastodon not having an algorithm, so I decided to give BlueSky a go, and climb back into my filter bubble, but it's even worse. Just an endless stream of people reporting US pol happenings at each other - unsourced - using screenshots of multicoloured block-letters.

i went to bed and opened youtube. guess what, there it was again.

Advertisers aren't incentivised to show you ads for what you actually want. They're incentivised to get money for showing you ads for what you plausibly might want, for the lowest cost possible.

And if you buy one thing and the algorithms go "finally! Some signal" you should be happy - it means you're hiding from them quite well.

Any "discovery" algorithm that shows you a wildly varying set of things is still mostly in explore mode. And if they're easy to tune out and swat away you can be grateful.