[ale] [OT] totally creepy phone action

Alex Carver agcarver+ale at acarver.net
Sat Apr 26 22:48:01 EDT 2014


On 4/26/2014 7:03 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> I taught an intro self defense class today and a student asked for a PDF of
> the handout. I was ready for this and pulled out my android phone to email
> a copy of the PDF I had stashed earlier on the phone. I was using my gmail
> account account to send to an emory.edu account. I have never met this
> person before and have had no prior communications with them. I do not get
> my emory email using gmail but I do use the google/android supplied
> exchange client to get my work email so the communication is SUPPOSED to be
> encrypted between server and phone. This person's name was on an email I
> got on my Emory account as having paid but not their email address. Their
> address was first.last at emory.edu
> 
> I started typing in the student's Emory email address and gmail
> auto-completed for me.
> 
> Correctly.
> 
> This happened TWICE with two different Emory students in the same class.
> 
> My GPS was probably on and the class was posted on the recreation site. Has
> Google become so adept at deducing what's going on that they can predict
> who will attend a seminar class and correlate with a GPS location to
> correctly guess TWICE on a non-gmail email address?!?!?
> 
> Totally creepy and I'm thinking about tossing my phone in front of a steam
> roller.

Not surprising.  Your exchange client probably automatically populated
the phone's on-board contacts database which the Gmail app can access.
So once you started typing, the Gmail app scoured your contact list
including auto-populated values.

This same thing happened on my phone without GPS being turned on.  I set
up the Samsung email app to let me send mail through my private server.
 I sent a note to my dad using my own server (IMAPS with certificate).
Later I was checking the contacts for something else with another app
and his email was right there.



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