Some time ago I did a tonne of searches looking for vintage seiko watches. I then started noticing a lot of spam to my email accounts (on google and otherwise) selling fake watches.
So, I was looking for ebooks last night. Did plenty of googles yesterday. I wake up to my gmail spam folder with a spam for ebooks. Something I’ve never noticed before.
I know the most likely case is that I don’t conciously take note of spam topics when I regularly delete my spam and it’s only when I’m concentrating on the topic that I start noticing spam about that topic. I guess it was already there.
But it is a really strange occurrence.
Is there any possibility or plausible mechanism either google or spammers could know my email addresses?
Like, is there some great big spammer database out there that they map all accounts to an ip or a cookie or something?