[liberationtech] Creepy Google Issue

[Yosem Companys]

From: Steve Sebestyen <speed50 at gmail.com>

Considering a similar thread I saw this morning regarding Google I'd like
to ping the group to share a creepy experience and see if perhaps others
have had a similar experience.

This morning my wife grabbed her phone to do a search for activities at
Chelsea Piers. She followed that up with another inquiry for hours at a
local mall. Five minutes later I launched Google Now for stock updates and
what do I see? At the top of the Google Now window was a map and
approximate time to Chelsea Piers. I was pretty astonished that Google had
linked my wife's search to me somehow. Our accounts are only linked via
Google Calendar but no event was created by her.

I then followed up with a search. As I began the query with our local town
it auto-completed it with mall hours. The very same query my wife ran. That
was too much for my comfort.

I've unlinked our accounts in every way I can think of barring a complete
deletion of my account.

The only other vector I can imagine Google uses to provide such creepy
behavior is that both of our phones were connected to our WiFi AP and
therefore share a common external IP. Still, for me that's too much of a
'seamless experience'.

Has anyone experienced anything like this?

Steve Sebestyen
203-604-6963
About.me/stevesebestyen
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