Virus & Home Alarm thought, question?

Are any of the email you received from the company you purchased from? Or maybe from a company somehow associated with the online vendor?

That being said, if you transacted your online purchase using Chrome and you received an order confirmation email in your Gmail inbox, chances are your interest in a home security system already know to the system. Can not rule out the spyware or other malware, but it is also possible that your email contact was somehow "sold" by the online vendor.

 

... or by gmail's owner, Google / Alphabet itself.

Isn't that the primary purpose of gmail, so that Google can mine the content of customers' email traffic for all the individual detail they can possibly monetize? In return, customers get "free" email service.

That is, presuming your gmail address was used in any way for the purchase transaction / receipt / acknowledgement.

 

Gmail certainly reads and extracts the contents to be used for Google's own apps and ads, but I am not sure if they do actually solicit the email address to third parties. That being said, I would not be surprised if that's what they do. As the adage says, "If you are not paying for a product then you are the product."

 

Yup they love to know everything you do, maybe try protonmail it is very good.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

I was thinking of the model used in some other advertising, where the customer list is never handed over directly to the advertiser. Instead, the company with the list of customer leads (e.g. Google) sends out the advertising on behalf of the advertiser (e.g. the competing security companies) to people fitting the desired profile. The advertisers get the contact information only of the people who respond, generally directly to the advertiser. The advertiser never gets contact info for the people who don't respond.

This is a way for the holder of the lead list to protect it as proprietary information, so that they can continue to sell the service repeatedly, collecting revenue from each mass mailing. If they turned over the customer email lists to the advertisers, those advertisers don't need to come back to buy more service, at least not on a frequent basis.

 

But it's not.

Google scans everything that goes through G-mail. That's not a bug, it's part of the deal. I don't know how they apply the data, but why would they not monetize it? If you want to test this, try sending some emails referring to something that you've never seen ads for. Try, oh, "Bidets" or "Affordable private airplane", or "Worlds best golf club" or "Real Emerald jewelry". Anything that can be sold and that you've never mentioned there before.

If you have a friend who's on G-mail, and want to have some fun with them, send them an innocuous email that has a few lines at the bottom written in white text on a white background. A human won't see it but the computer will. See if you can get his computer to serve him ads for, oh wait, I can't mention that kind of thing here...