Comment by Silhouette

I wish organisations would respect the fact that I want to have different accounts for different purposes. This is often a security precaution to make sure that personal matters don't interfere with anything I'm doing for work or vice versa - or that work on one project for one customer and work on another project for another customer are completely independent and anything that compromises one in a security incident can't affect the other.

The modern trend of trying to tie everything you ever do to a specific phone number and in some cases not even allowing multiple accounts to be created using the same phone number undermines that compartmentalisation.

My own creepy Google story was about their relatively recent Google TV Streamer products that have basically replaced the old simple-but-effective Chromecast sticks. As soon as we started to set one up it wanted us to have a Google account (entirely unnecessary of course because we had accounts on each relevant streaming service already) and that in turn wanted all kinds of data about where our home was and so on. Obviously the device has wireless connectivity so I'm suspicious that it's also scanning for other network and location data and phoning home with that as well to associate with the physical address it already asked for.

It turned out that when we eventually reset it and used the remote (slow and painful as that is) to type in our credentials for the streaming services we wanted to use then we didn't need the Google account after all. But of course they've already got that account now and no doubt associated lots of quite detailed geographic and network information using just that five minute data grab. This kind of thing really should be just plain illegal. It's deceptive, intrusive, and malicious.