That would require you to create some association between your personal and work account right? I don't remember doing that. I guess they could match on first name and last name equality, but that sounds like a bad idea due to name collisions and impersonation.
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.
Because as a Google employee they understand what is and isn't done as a matter of privacy?
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)?
Some years ago, I watched some historical TV show (could be Rome?) where one of the characters has been diagnosed with some disease, so I wondered if they knew how to properly diagnose it at the time the show was set at. So I used Google to search for the disease to get to its Wikipedia page. Then I almost forgot about it.
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.
If there was any such evidence, it would only be known to a small subset of people who work at Google. The only thing anyone else has to go on is very general privacy policies and Google employees commenting on forums! The public only has an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.
>"That would require you to create some association between your personal and work account right?"
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.
You really think that Google spent the time to build a system that secretly links employees’ accounts to their personal accounts—something that Googlers would have to build and would also piss off those same Googlers—and then uses that system to prioritize feedback from Googlers just to make their own employees have a better Maps feedback experience?
No, I think Google built a system to link every email address used by an individual and all their browsing habits. Not specific to their employees but to do that on everyone in the planet.
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.”
You're misunderstanding as you speculating. You've now shifted to "Googler has a special friendly-spying apparatus, enabled by its core technology", to "every company has the same apparatus, and low level line employees are treated the same as EVPs", which is absurd as everyone here knows.
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.
So if I work from a coffeeshop all the other coffeeshop patrons would be considered Google employees?
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.)
Sure it could be more intelligent, but there would always be false positives. For example a Google employee's spouse could likely get correlated. False positives sounds like a bad idea for a system that tries to match personal and work accounts. Also in my case it would be harder possibly because I have a ton of personal Google 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.
There is a ton of other information. E.g. for the “security” you are asked to provide a backup email address for your Google account. Also, for the same reason, everyone is now required to provide a cellphone number. If you used one of your Google accounts as a backup for another, or used the same recovery phone number for both, these two accounts can be linked to a same person. This comes in addition to other information about possible links, like geolocation or other trove of data they might have. If you added several accounts to check emails, your phone checks all of them every couple of minutes, from the same IP at the same time, whether you’re at home or not.
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’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a very real thing that all the major players do and a bunch of 3rd party startups as well. Logging in from same browser, showing similar habits on the same IP from home, etc. it’s typically part of data enrichment. I worked on a project that tied into a system like this about 5ish years ago and it was fascinating how deep this goes. I thought I was just not on top of things but now I see a google employee also in the dark about it. This feels like one of those things 5 years from now will create a scandal when a journalist wraps their head around what it is
Associating these accounts using data like IP address, cookies, etc. etc., over time, is core technology for Google and probably happens automatically. Whether they use it to prioritize Maps suggestions I don't know.
Before you start working at Google and get an internal email address you have almost certainly communicated with HR using your external email address...a basic profile has been setup etc
A typical facebook/google employee defending his company.
Common is it that hard to link whether its same or different people? The people who use same browser, ip , same habit etc can easily be guessed right?
I don't use the same browser for my personal and work accounts. Yeah guesses can be made, but they'll have false positives (spouses for example). For a system to link personal and work accounts I think false positives would be bad.
