You say you work for Google, so you must know that the company you work for amasses huge amounts of information on billions of people on the internet. It then uses that information to sell personalized ads to these people. Advertisers love that, and they pay the rates, and that's how Google makes money for your paycheck — and much more.
What makes you think they "require" any action on the part of these people to "create associations" between accounts? They are making billions by doing it because they can.
Do you have any evidence that Google spies on its own employees for the purpose of giving them privileged manual treatment when they don't ask for it?
Do you have any evidence that Google create associations between separate Google accounts to the extent of treating them as the same accountholder (asside from deleting duplicate spam accounts)?
For months after that, Google bombarded me with the links to the disease and cures and remedies and whatnot.
I remember even seeing that at my kid's gaming PC, and I don't remember ever logging in to my Google account there. We only shared the same IP in the household.
That's pretty anecdotal, I know, but that's what there is.
Obtuse af. Is this default assumption that the user is the one who has to "create" associations in the company's systems based on anything? The big tech cos have been social mapping since before 2012 and they undoubtedly register when two accounts use the same IP.
Creating a system to secretly map my work account and my personal account in order to prioritize my Maps suggestions seems like a huge amount of work for no benefit whatsoever.
E.g. a coffeeshop has a constant stream of accounts on its IP that appear only once or twice. So it might be considered "a public place". So no association is done over accounts arriving from that IP. Your home, OTOH, might have only two accounts on its IP for years, so the association here is stronger.
A cookie shared between two accounts is even a stronger indication, as a person used the same browser to log in with both.
The system might not be created "to prioritize Maps suggestions" only and has multiple benefits in other places. Most obvious of these is to prevent people banned from the service to come back with a different account.
(I don't work at G and never did, but worked at another place where we linked accounts.)
>A cookie shared between two accounts is even a stronger indication, as a person used the same browser to log in with both.
I never use the same browser for my work and personal accounts. But in theory that could run into the spousal problem as well for some people.
In short, the amount of data you are passing to Google, willingly or not, allows them to link these to a single person — you — with an extremely high certainty.
It also makes the simple connection that a user also has a google.com account without doing anything special.
Although I suspect they do have something home built as every single company I’ve worked for with a broad customer facing product has had some flag to note employee accounts. I built this sometimes and was usually to help understand if some random suggestion was from a bigwig worth looking up. You never want to be in a situation where “Ms So and So, EVP of some department you don’t know submitted a question a week ago and got no answer. She mentioned it to me at the EVP monthly hobo hunt, yadda yadda yadda.”
And saying "hobo hunt" shows you obviously aren't engaging in serious conversation.
I was trying to convey that Google just already tracks all linked email accounts so it seems natural that they would be able to trivially identify or prioritize inbound suggestions from employees.
I also wanted to say that even if they did build a custom system to sort employees, it’s not hard. It’s not a super secret tech, but something I’ve personally implemented in an afternoon 20 years ago, so I think it’s safe to assume that it’s easy to do. If they want to.
I added the “hobo hunt” joke as I think infusing humor in arbitrary engagements makes it easier to engage in serious conversation. And all my serious conversations involve humor. Of course, I seriously doubt that any company executives routinely engage in hunting homeless persons and used something extremely absurd and impossible.