Something decidedly weird happened at the computer yesterday. I am at work, where I had, until a couple of months ago, refused to use the work PCs to log into any of my personal accounts. I don’t necessarily trust this organization not to skim passwords, deliberately or not, and keep them secure. It’s not lost on me that anything done on these machines is supposed to be for the better good of the company, and blahblahblah. But virtually everybody here is online shopping Amazon and even checking their personal gmail accounts, so I don’t feel I’m breaching that kind of etiquette by logging into personal accounts. I just don’t want to get too comfortable or presumptuous. This is why I limited my logins to a couple of harmless sites; nytimes.com and newspapers.com. I would not be making purchases or reveling too much about myself should prying eyes have nothing better to do than skim through my newspapers.com clippings or saved New York Times articles.
The weird thing that happened yesterday involved newspapers.com. After some period of time, probably a month, you get logged out automatically. Fine. My email address login and gibberish password were saved by the browser’s password manager. The browser is Chrome on Windows 11. I am not nor have I ever been logged into Chrome, but even if I was I never use it for personal stuff. I use Vivaldi, which is of course a Chromium overlay, but still, I don’t think that explains what happened when I tried to log back in to newspapers.com
I clicked the mouse on the first login box, where I expected my email address to appear. It did appear, but mysteriously to me, so too did 6 or 7 other email addresses I use for other purposes. Never, not once, had I typed any of these email addresses into this browser. There was even a burner email address I had forgotten about, and which I would never be able to remember or enter into this browser without digging it up from a personal email account that I have never logged into from this browser.
How did these email addresses autofill on a browser I’m not logged into, on a machine where I’ve never once used any of these addresses to login to anything? It’s especially unnerving to me because I’ve mostly succeeded at limiting the amount of personal information I type into these office computers. I do not consider myself paranoid but the reality is that this is not my network and I should have no expectation of privacy.
Where did those email addresses come from? How did they appear on a browser I was never logged into and into which I never typed them in? Does the answer lie with newspapers.com? Does their login form somehow skim other email addresses from my personal browser’s autocomplete history and make them available as autocomplete options on their login page wherever I access it? That seems crazy but I have not tested it and don’t know if I will have time to do so.
