I can search for something on Duck Duck Go running on Firefox on my Galaxy S7 and see YouTube recommendations based on that. This has happened twice. Yes, I checked Amazon for hammock hooks, but that doesn’t mean I want to watch hammock videos.

I’m signed into Google on my phone, something that is personally necessary, so a Google tracker knows that’s me, but this is still disturbing. I didn’t enter it into a Google search or use Google’s browser. Both Duck Duck Go and Mozilla are privacy advocates and promote their products and services to the privacy conscious, but Google still knows. I don’t know if Amazon shared the information or if Google took it from my phone.

I’ve been trying to sandbox Google as much as I can. For example I go to Google sites using the Chromium browser on my desktop computer, and do everything else in Firefox, but Google still knows what operating system and IP address that is. So if they see Firefox come across a web tracker from my IP address, they still know it’s me. Even if I made my computer a Google free zone, my phone or my wife’s phone would still give it away and Google knows my wife and I well enough by this time that I’m sure they can tell the difference.

From the standpoint of email, considering how much of the world is on Gmail, using G Suite, or having Google do their spam detection, even if you do all of your email through ProtonMail, Google is still reading most of it. Sure, they can’t scan the contents of your mailbox, but they don’t need to if they’re still processing half of your email.

However, I can’t help but wonder if I’m thinking about all of this wrong. Internet privacy is important and our society hasn’t discussed it enough, but I can’t tell if it’s just too late or if I’m just using the wrong metaphor to help me think about these complex topics.