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Comment by staticautomatic | Hacker News Reader

Information about one's relatives is basically a default offering by every data broker that deals in PII. The most likely explanation is that the author provided information about himself to a company which, in turn, supplemented it with data about him pulled from a broker.

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What I don't understand is why it's in his Chrome saved addresses. I checked mine and it's - just my address and my previous address. And my linked account is old, I opened my gmail account a year after gmail became a thing.

Google for sure has more addresses about me, but they don't show up in Chrome.

My best guess is that Google has some kind of reciprocal data-sharing partnership with one of the entities that was aggregating data on this guy for whatever reason, and somehow all or part of whatever file they have on him is exposed via Chrome.

It's definitely possible that Google actually doesn't have that info on you. Not a lot of companies spend the amount of money necessary to pull data from the primary brokers/aggregators, and when they do, they likely don't do it for all of their customers.

It's in his saved addresses because he saved them.

Any explanation involving some mysterious cross-contamination across Google's various data repositories (as if everything is in one giant database) doesn't pass the smell test.

The Saved Address is what you let Chrome store to automatically fill forms. It's not your addresses in your Google Account. These are different things.

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