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

'Forbes article by Joe Toscano, a former experience design consultant
for Google who in 2017 "decided to step away from my role consulting
with Google, due to ethical concerns."

This summer he got a big surprise when he looked in Chrome's
"addresses" panel at chrome://settings/addresses

It turns out Google has info connecting me to my grandma (on my dad's
side) who's alive and well but has never had the internet, and my
grandpa (on my mom's side), who recently passed away in March 2019 and
also never had the internet. This was disturbing for several reasons,
the biggest of which being that neither of them had ever logged onto
the internet in their lives. Neither even had the internet in their
homes their entire lives! Beyond that, Google knew their exact
addresses and their middle initials. I couldn't even have told you
those things about my grandparents...

[T]he data wasn't manually entered by me or anyone using my account,
but yet the data is associated with my account? How did that happen?
The only thing I can think of is that at one point in history my
grandpa gave his information to someone or some company in real life
and his information was sold to Google at one point or another... But
then that led me to another question: How did his data get associated
with my Google account...?

Other questions I have: What other information does Google have about
me/my family/others that I don't know about...?

He's now asking readers if they have any idea how Google connected him
to his dead grandpa -- and whether Google is somehow creating an
ancestry database.

Toscano also discovered Chrome has been creating a list of "Never
Saved" passwords at chrome://settings/passwords?search=credentials
even though "At no point did I tell Google to create and store a list
of websites I had logged into that they didn't get access to but would
like access to at some point in the future. Maybe in the Terms of
Service/Privacy Policy I agreed to this, but who knows? Not the
majority of us, and it's just creepy."

And in an update Toscano writes that he hopes the article will
"provoke thought" about "why we willingly allow this to happen":

Why is it okay that the internet is designed to be a surveillance
machine? Why isn't it designed to be private by design? Is this how we
want to carry on? Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's
right. What would you like to see done? How would you like to see
things changed?'

-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/09/07/168245

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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