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Wow, that's an impressive amount of change.

I'm curious how you think you were linked. Also, how you have identified that you were successfully linked?

Perhaps you still have the same social media accounts somewhere? Perhaps you used your same PC you'd formerly used when creating new ones? Perhaps your friends merely updated their phone's contact information for you rather than deleting the contact and adding new ones?

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I’ve been off social media for a very long time; kind of a hipster about it :)

I wasn’t able to identify where it came from, but I do suspect it’s the latter — which is really hard to deal with because it’s other people leaking info about you. But the same could have happened with facial recognition at an ATM or checkout.

Personally, I’ve accepted that being an American in 2021 just means being under constant surveillance. The fantasies of going off-grid will run into the realities of your human relationships.

It's sad that your last point is the current state of affairs. My kids (in their 20's) have a completely differ idea of privacy, and are really ignorant of how much data exists on them.

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