OK, here's the scoop.

We have a house sitter from the Uni who will be here while we're in Santa Fe next month. We exchanged cell phone numbers via email. I saw hers and wondered where her area code was located so I began to search.

I typed "area code" into Google, and was just about to put her code into the search ...

What to my wondering eye pops up? Well, Mr. Google gives a list of area codes I might want to search, starting with hers.

What gives? Is my computer sharing the contents of my email with Google? How could Google have pulled up the exact area code before I even typed it in???

We're all familiar with advertisements decorating web pages based on what we searched for earlier in the day, but this is a bit scarier. Perhaps it was just a coincidence? Her area code is pretty big.

Do you use an iPhone and an iMac? Or you’re using the Google browser on your phone and laptop?

Everything is linked.

There’s no going back.

I'm on my Apple laptop, using Safari as the browser. But Google is my search engine.

Reading my email is beyond the pale.

Google does scan your email, if you use Gmail. It uses the contents for targeted advertising.

I thought Google stopped that practice a few years ago.

But I don't know if they are reading emails, Gmail or otherwise, in order to improve search results....

I stopped using Google search quite a while ago and use DuckDuckGo almost exclusively.

P*D, was it your work email or a gmail account?

But yeah, it's beyond the pale. Internet connectivity has gone completely beyond the pale and will never be back to this side of the pale ever again.

My work account. I use it for just about everything.

I'm thinking coinkidink might be in play here. Her area code is perhaps the most populous in the state, so Google just listed it first, knowing what state we live in.

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
My work account.

Does that mean your employer outsourced the email function to Google? Don't know about higher education institutions, but lots of (small) businesses outsource their email function to Google but most likely the contract with these businesses are such that Google refrains from reading too much into your work email for advertising purposes.

In some sense, Google has to "read" your email otherwise it cannot construct the search indices that allow you to quickly search through your emails. Google has to "read" your email to determine whether one is spam. Google has to "read" your attachments too because otherwise it cannot scan for viruses and malware that may be embedded in your attachments.

These apply to just about any email service provider that wants to offer the (now) basic functions of "search", "spam filtering", and "virus protection."

For true privacy, you basically have to encrypt your stuff before letting it leave your computer.

TBH, I don't really know who handles the university email account.

There is a difference between "reading" my emails automatically for those largely autonomous functions, and "reading" my emails to create a database (which they sell) for keeping tabs on me and marketing to me.

As I said, I think the "read" in this case may have been less nefarious than I first suspected and more in line with certain automatic protocols. A person in Virginia who asks about area codes is probably given a list starting with the most populous one in the same state.

Google would know your PC's IP address unless you’ve turned off a privacy setting feature that displays the IP address. If it’s on, then google can approximately estimate where you are based on the IP address. It wouldn't know where someone is located by an area code embedded in an e-mail.

By the way: Beware of using work computers for personal e-mail. Certain people who work in your organization might be able to read them. At least, they can where I work, a government agency.