Thanks much for this! I haven't had time to read all the comments yet, so I don't know if this has been covered, but another data point for smartphone stuff:
I have an iphone and both my gmail accounts (real name & fannish/friends-only) are linked up to the mail app on the phone. When I went to purge my web history for my real name google account it included the search history from my phone. (My fandom/friends google account already had the web history thing disabled, so I don't know if it would have also shown up there also.)
That was also the first brush I had with google merging my data without my knowledge as well. Now I'm just worried that somehow my two google accounts will get merged (which would be a mess of epic proportions to untangle on just a logistical level, even apart from a privacy one), though I think (hope) that having two different gmail addresses, very different usage patterns, and a tendency to use different browsers for each account will prevent that. The other thing I'm worried about in a vague undefined way is that I rely on google products every day for my job -- everyone at my office uses gmail, we gchat each other constantly to talk about projects, we use both google calendars and google docs to coordinate everything, we use analytics for our site, we use google maps, we use YouTube -- it's one thing when I'm trying to protect my own privacy, but when I think about it in terms of what google could figure out about our internal workings, our not-yet-public projects, and our clients and vendors, and therefore by extension other companies' internal workings, etc -- that really freaks me out.
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I have an iphone and both my gmail accounts (real name & fannish/friends-only) are linked up to the mail app on the phone. When I went to purge my web history for my real name google account it included the search history from my phone. (My fandom/friends google account already had the web history thing disabled, so I don't know if it would have also shown up there also.)
That was also the first brush I had with google merging my data without my knowledge as well. Now I'm just worried that somehow my two google accounts will get merged (which would be a mess of epic proportions to untangle on just a logistical level, even apart from a privacy one), though I think (hope) that having two different gmail addresses, very different usage patterns, and a tendency to use different browsers for each account will prevent that. The other thing I'm worried about in a vague undefined way is that I rely on google products every day for my job -- everyone at my office uses gmail, we gchat each other constantly to talk about projects, we use both google calendars and google docs to coordinate everything, we use analytics for our site, we use google maps, we use YouTube -- it's one thing when I'm trying to protect my own privacy, but when I think about it in terms of what google could figure out about our internal workings, our not-yet-public projects, and our clients and vendors, and therefore by extension other companies' internal workings, etc -- that really freaks me out.