Hey, my friend and I have a similar problem with YouTube. The other day my YouTube history started showing up on his account. We never signed in to each other’s accounts either. I should probably mention this is my YouTube history from . Please help ASAP! It’s really wired and creepy. Some of his history wasn’t even anything I watched!

I think my computer has a virus. But it’s a weird one. Whenever I go to some sites, in the past I was bored and looked at something called dueling network. I quickly backed out and clicked on it again and this time it made me go to the normal page. But it did this every time I opened a new browser. But then it started doing this with other random sites too. Help?

I have had the weekend from hell gf has been watching my google chrome searches from my work computer pop up on her google chrome app on her android phone, she thinks I am into her phone watching her. Nothing bad on the search history but she might break up with me over it thinking I am spying. I have since cleaned up my machines paid a service to look thru my machines and was told I was infected, I have been on her network with my other chrome sync-ed devices and also logged into the YouTube google account that seemed to be the problem on one of her devices. Ugh what a problem! Not sure I like this new sync idea a cloud stuff seems to open up other problems.

It sounds like she is logged into your Chrome account on her phone. Likely all she needs to do is to sign out as you.

Closing comments since most comments (included many pruned) are nothing more than questions answered by the article. PLEASE read the article.

However, there are many more benign scenarios. It’s possible your browser may simply be doing a good job protecting you.

Malware

These days, my first recommendation when you run into unexpected history entries is to make sure your machine has no malware. In particular, I suggest you run the tools outlined in How Do I Remove PUPs, Foistware, Drive-bys, Toolbars, and Other Annoying Things I Never Wanted?

Traditional pop-ups and pop-unders

Pop-up blockers — now built into most browsers — keep pop-up and pop-under windows from displaying. The blockers intercept the requests to create new browser windows and prevent them.

My theory is that the URLs behind blocked pop-ups sometimes still appear in your history, having been added to the list before the pop-up is blocked. You’ve never seen the site, but it’s there in the list.

One page, many sources

Some webpages that look like a single page are actually a composite of more than one page or page fragments. What you see as a single URL [Uniform Resource Locator]

Depending on how your browser handles these requests, it’s possible that these page elements could appear as individual entries in your history. You wouldn’t recognize them, because they’re not pages you explicitly visited, but they’re present because they were part of some page you did.

Browser pre-fetch

Many web browsers now include a feature where they begin fetching the pages linked to in the page you’re currently viewing.

The idea is that when you click a link on the page, if all or even some of it has already been downloaded, it’ll come up much more quickly. That there’s downloading going on you didn’t explicitly ask for is typically not an issue, because you’re busy reading the page you originally requested.