As much as people like to delve into conspiratorial gossiping, making swooping statements about how Google and Amazon work together, there’s often much simpler and more reasonable explanations.

For one, you are one of billions of people browsing both these sites today, it’s bound to happen to some of you.

But what prompted you to look up the horses stuff? Sometimes it’s an article, a social media post (reddit and Lemmy count), a radio segment, etc. That often leads a group of people to look up the same stuff en-masse.

Its also possible that you’ve visited other sites about horses that have put you in that cohort, where manufacturers have placed their own tracking pixels whose info they can supply to Amazon for targeting.

The reason why a Google / Amazon collaboration seems so unlikely is that they are competing. Not just at large, but in this specific case. Those recommendations you see on Amazon are ads too. People pay for them, and use specific targeting rules to find people to click on them. This is what both Amazon and Google sell, access to specific eyeballs (eg. males in their late 30’s who have once shown interest in motorsports). This is their secret sauce. They’d be crazy to allow that information to flow to a competitor with their own ad platform.

I know this goes against the grain here, so feel free to downvote, but keep in mind that conjecture and wildly inaccurate gossip about what these giant companies do often muddies the waters and makes it much harder to attack them on the shady and downright evil stuff that they do do.

Amazon has connections with everyone including banks.

Amazon likes to offer a free trial and then after you cancel well before the free trial ends, they continue to charge you month by month.

I had this happen to me a few times. The most recent time I reported my American Express card lost/stolen, that way I would get an entirely different card number/expiration/cvv/ everything. I continued to get charged every month by Amazon.

Turns out banks will continue allowing certain companies like Amazon to continue taking payment even though the original card information you provided was changed and reported lost/stolen. Amazon is so big they can ask for your CC information once and continue to take payment without re-authorization no matter the situation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/16bpca8/comment/k8u5mps/

Do not use Amazon for anything.

Anonymized user info is sold on open markets and can be de-anonymized through fingerprinting and various other techbiques.

You can find some interestinf info on it here, even though the core of the article is on a somewhat unrelated topic.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ads-to-find-targets-and-vladimir-putin/

De-google everything. I use a VPN and run LibreWolf with some plugins like uBlock, uMatrix, deArrow and SponsorBlock. Still haven’t gotten around installing Lineage on my phone to get rid of Google there, but at least I run VPN on my phone at all times aswell.

Now since I use LibreWolf it deletes cookies on every shutdown. This is a bit annoying because I have to log back in every time I visit websites. Therefore I run BitWarden and have also allowed some cookies in website settings.

Its not the best privacy solutions but it’s an easy setup for a lot of profit imo.

Has happened to me multiple times.

your first mistake was to use what I presume was a stock android phone with the official YouTube app. Switch to Lineage/Divest/Graphene and NewPipe

I can see the devices you use mattering. Where were you watching the videos? Do you have the Amazon app installed on the same device, or on a device with a microphone? My tin-foil hat theory is that the Amazon app is always listening from your phone, based on similar things happening to my wife.