Got an interesting issue, maybe you can solve
While writing a comment today dealing with how Google Home was not recording my kids requests and quite often not mine, I was researching my activity on Google.
TL;DR – sites I’m not visiting appearing in Chrome on Android, how does one find what app spawned them?
I discovered some interesting activity in my browser. Evidently right as I walked into the office, or about the time I hit WiFi, I was supposedly (according to my activity logs,) browsing a porn website and a potato recipe in Chrome on my Galaxy Note 8.
Now for me to walk and browse isn’t abnormal. That said, I wasn’t. There’s probably video I wasn’t. Phone was in my back pocket and was not looked at from 6:52-8:45.
I also wasn’t going to a site called strip chat, nor was I planning a baked potato based sexual act at 8:25am.
I checked the activity, it had come from my Note 8, and was during a time I was not on it. I swear. I’ve probably got video of me talking to a coworker while my phone was browsing Stripchat and being the millionth visitor somewhere 3 minutes later.
Opened up Chrome on the phone at 8:45 to see what was going on, yup, there’s a site called Stripchat although the millionth visitor site is nowhere to be found, nor the potatoes.
Now there’s another layer to the oddness. A little before this I was supposedly playing some game according to Google. This game, I didn’t recognize. And I’d tell you what it is, but I’m not seeing it on My Activity any more.
Let’s assume for the sake of sanity I misread the My Activity and that I don’t have a piece of malware that’s got access to erase my activity on Google.
As this is not a popup, this is going on in the Chrome browser on my phone, the logs I know that I have say effectively that I visited this site… well, yes, the browser did indeed visit a porn site at about the exact time I walked into WiFi range at work. What triggered that action?

Also for reasons unknown I’m evidently hot and heavy into baked potatoes.
So, on inspection – Stripchat remained, I didn’t see a congrats, nor were my spuds there.
As this isn’t a pop up, don’t know what triggered it. It’s not actively running in the foreground. Not a terribly useful trail I can find.
Any idea how one finds that “potatoeffers” open in Chrome was requested by a particular app? Why Chrome triggered at 8:25? Anything useful?
Google’s stuff is great… when it works. Which, as someone who has been using a Google Home for several years now, seems both random and temperamental. I have auto-unlock for my door… which only seems to work “when it wants to”. Half the time in my car, if I tell Google to play a station on Pandora, it will either ignore the request entirely or say “I’m sorry, I couldn’t open that app”. And my ChromeCast Ultra out of nowhere two days ago decided it just didn’t feel like streaming YouTube videos anymore from Google Home. Now anytime I ask one of the Home devices to stream, instead of the YouTube Video I get an error message telling me that the video can’t play because I have to “turn off restricted mode”. Except that the video isn’t mature content and there’s no way to toggle a “restricted mode” on OR off when it comes to Chromecast or Google Home. So… no more streaming videos with the Chromecast.
Google’s ecosystem has a long way to go before I would consider it anything close to reliable.
Don’t know about the potatoes but stripchat is well known malware (or virus, depending on your definition). Google “stripchat malware” for information and removal.
Only thing I see on malware or popups is PC programs / chrome for pc. This was in Android chrome.
Upon examining my apps I notice there’s a new game I didn’t install that was installed yesterday. Install location was the play store. Think a kiddo might have installed it, it might be the game I saw listed before it disappeared… going to remove and see if that doesn’t make the oddness go away.
Could you have permitted a website to send you notifications/updates and that site was hacked so as to get your phone to hit up these other dodgy sites?
After uninstalling a game or two my kiddo downloaded it stopped popping up. Think it was just a bad app