Is there a browser plugin or something that can keep google in check? Like separating youtube, gmail and the search into different "sandboxes"? Maybe blocking some of the annoying popups that constantly demand your info?
I'm not familiar with such a thing, but it could be kinda nice to have it.
I don't know but you can use private or incognito mode, or different browsers (Firefox, I.E., TorBrowser...) to be logged in differently. NoScript can block popups, may glitch site.
Edit: For Youtube, if you turn on safe mode, hiding comments, it may prevent the box talking about the new comments section, but now I do not see see it with it off, so I may be wrong.
Even if you run YouTube, Gmail and search in different incognito windows so that they don't share cookies, they could still figure out that all these requests were coming from the same browser (via browser fingerprinting) at the same IP address.
I've been told by a Google engineer (on G+) that IP addresses aren't used for identity purposes. Whether or not they're aggregated at other levels ... would be interesting. I'm not sure whether or not browser fingerprinting is used at all, though I've suggested some reasonably non-invasive ways in which it might be applied for abuse and harassment mitigation, say: hashing fingerprints and storing them with the complainant's account in order to detect sockpuppet attacks.
You couldn't reverse the hash to determine the fingerprint, but if fingerprints matched, you'd have identical hashes. Splitting out different data records might help create probabalistic matches (e.g., n of m hashes match for an identity probability of p).
Tor would of course address IP issues. Privoxy could handle browser fingerprinting.
What do you think you'd be accomplishing with this? Google knows all of those accounts are associated with the same person already. Otherwise they wouldn't be asking you to merge them. They just want your official stamp on it so you feel like they asked your permission first.
