Mystery ads appearing on your screen.

And how to block them - protonvpn.com/blog/block-online-tracking/

Oh yes, and, even more mysteriously, as I live in Germany, I am fascinated that when we are discussing, say, flowers r beds or washing machines here on Gransnet, I get an ad in German for such an item.

Do you use an internet provider based in Germany? Or maybe the IP addresses that are alllocated to our connections vary from one country to another?

You are being monitors. Everything you look up is being monitored. I know this for a fact because my friends son does this as his job. It's for targeting advertisements.

If you don't want ads to be targeted specially for you, you can select this in the privacy section. You'll still get ads, but they will be random and you won't feel you are being spied on.

Newatthis It probably isn't a real person like your friend's son sitting there monitoring every visitor to every page of a website. In the source code for each page, there is a section of instructions to the server on which that page is hosted, telling it what to look for and what to do when/if it finds it. You can see the source code from one of the menus at the top of the screen (could be under "browser tools") - pages and pages of mostly incomprehensible stuff. but here and the are bits with // at the start. These are comments, explaining to the programmer what the next bit does. They say things like
" // Get number of visits with adblocker from cookie
(If it is) // User's 5th visit with an adblock and has already seen consent banner (do ?something?)
(If it is) // GFC CMP is enabled and user has not seen consent banner (do ?something else?) "

So you can see what the Gransnet pages are trying to do with the info that the tracking pixels are collecting, even if how that go about doing it look like gobbledegook. The programmers who write this ( like your friend's son)have my respect!