Got an interesting issue, maybe you can solve

February 12, 2020February 12, 2020 Paul E King 6 Comments

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?