Unearthing Myself – Akira Wakita, Dean of the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies
2020.06.02
I use YouTube Live for some of my online lectures. Since YouTube is a Google service, you first need to create a Google account. In April, when I tried to get an account with my work email address, I got a message saying, "That email address is already in use."
"Huh, that's strange," I thought. How annoying that someone would use my email address without permission. As I stared at the screen in frustration, I noticed a link in small letters that said, "Reset password." I went through the reset process from there and managed to log in to Google using a URL sent to my email address. I was determined to find out what kind of rogue would create an account with someone else's email address.
That's when I realized.
This was an account I had created 15 years ago. It had been completely forgotten, lying dormant in the depths of cyberspace, untouched for 15 years. My web history from 2006 was still there.
"Programming" and "cars." That's all I was searching for 15 years ago. Regarding programming, the keyword "MFC" was there, so I might have still been using Windows back then. My memory of that time is hazy now.
When I told my wife about this, she said, "You haven't changed much at all, have you?"
If I had been using the same account for 15 years, I wonder how much search data I would have provided to Google.
Based on that information, what kind of information would be pushed to me? What kind of products would be recommended?
Incidentally, the most recent recommendation that caught my eye was a recommended product from Amazon that appeared on Facebook.
A large, orange convex mirror for roads. It even came with a mounting pole.