Google Has My Dead Grandpa’s Data and He Never Used the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Google Has My Dead Grandpa’s Data and He Never Used the Internet

forbes.com

57 pointsohjeez10 comments

I think this article was debunked heavily here: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/czfml2/google_h...

I would bet the farm on him having sent his grandparents packages from the internet years ago or filled out some sort of paperwork and forgotten.

Chromes addresses aren't pulled from a magic ether, unlike most of Google's offerings, they're exclusively things you've entered.

Clicking “never save password for this site” is obviously going to store the site somewhere, how does he think it works?

This goes beyond Google. Data aggregators in general are greedy bastards and absolutely refuse to throw anything away. All four of my grandparents have been dead twenty-thirty years but still show up in all of the people search sites and are known associates in my Transunion reports. Even in death you can not escape.

Information about one's relatives is basically a default offering by every data broker that deals in PII. The most likely explanation is that the author provided information about himself to a company which, in turn, supplemented it with data about him pulled from a broker.

What I don't understand is why it's in his Chrome saved addresses. I checked mine and it's - just my address and my previous address. And my linked account is old, I opened my gmail account a year after gmail became a thing.

Google for sure has more addresses about me, but they don't show up in Chrome.

It's in his saved addresses because he saved them.

Any explanation involving some mysterious cross-contamination across Google's various data repositories (as if everything is in one giant database) doesn't pass the smell test.

The Saved Address is what you let Chrome store to automatically fill forms. It's not your addresses in your Google Account. These are different things.

My best guess is that Google has some kind of reciprocal data-sharing partnership with one of the entities that was aggregating data on this guy for whatever reason, and somehow all or part of whatever file they have on him is exposed via Chrome.

It's definitely possible that Google actually doesn't have that info on you. Not a lot of companies spend the amount of money necessary to pull data from the primary brokers/aggregators, and when they do, they likely don't do it for all of their customers.

I can't wait for the GDPR--after addressing the most egregious privacy violators, to get around to these data-wigglers:

"we are committed to protecting the personal data of our audience", please click the big green button to forfeit any protection of your personal data.

They know darn well that's not how the GDPR works. Either block the EU or shape up.

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