So I recently discovered using multiple 'Users' in Google Chrome. It's super nice. I can have two accounts: one for personal use and another for gaming. This is so useful to me, personally, because I can keep things compartmentalized.
As soon as I discovered this I deleted my old account and proceeded to make two (2) new accounts. Both have the 'Security' option to attach those email accounts into my phone number. It's fine.
The first week or so I noticed both accounts remained separate. None of the YouTube channels I used to watch on my old account where popping up on either account. I though it was awesome.
A couple of days ago I started noticing a trend. Seldom, I would see 1/8 suggestions where suggestions of YouTube channels I used to watch on my old account. I'm talking about stuff 1-8 years old.
On top of that, for a while me and my SO started to noticed something else. If we had our phones in the room and talked about news for example. We noticed that what ever issue we where discussing started to be suggested in ads. Its super obvious well. Things I had never googled and never had interest in researching started to pop-up only hours - days after we spoke about it.
You see... I had the impression that internet 'Cookies' where the main way people where being tracked. Now, I think there is much more to it.
What does it feel like? What's our impression / take on all of this?
We feel that our phone's microphone is never turned off. As if everything we say is being converted to text, tagged for keywords, and then used for ads sales. Further more, it feels like associating your phone number to one or more gmail accounts creates a question. What do I mean by this? Well, as soon as I created both accounts I started noticing suggestions would popup on either account. Let's say I play Path of Exile... well I would also see suggestions for Path of Exile on my personal account. An account I use strictly for personal use. The question I think it brings up is: Is Account A being used by the same person as Account B. I noticed this because 1/8 suggestions felt like a captcha test... to see if the person using the 2 accounts has the same interest or not.
Sigh... We've gone as far as to leaving our 'creepy' phones out of the room and even then we see suggestions crossing between accounts.
I know people would read this and start to suggest various anonymity tools / sites, but that's not the point. I'm just trying to shed some light here... or at least, peak someone's curiosity enough that they would try to prove / disprove this.
After all, I'm no IT expert. What I can say is that I tried very hard to keep both accounts separate and to keep my phone out of the room with little to no success and that sucks.
Submitted September 09, 2020 at 10:24PM by untagatnu https://ift.tt/2GHAbDT via TikTokTikk
No comments:
Post a Comment