🐘☁️ Our family had trip to the awesome town of Pécs on the long weekend, I booked accommodation via a site well-known in Hungary (szallas.hu). I have used that site before but never created an account; I have been avoiding creating accounts whenever possible, for privacy reasons. When I already booked the accommodation, it turned out that an account would actually be useful, so I created one. I was worried how the account would relate to the booking I made a few days before. I should not have worried. It worked.

I not only saw in my account the booking I made a few days before, I also saw the one I made last year and the year before, etc. I saw ALL my history in the account I just created, reaching back to the covid era. (This was a wow moment similar to the one when I realized that the page google.com/history exists.)

Thinking over the database structure the site may have in the background (i.e. they had to record my e-mail address, had to link it to each of my reservations, etc), this behavior is logical, and I could have expected it. It even made me happy in the given case. Note that I do not mean to bash the given site, and now I assume many sites work similarly.

👉 Looking back, it was mighty stupid of me to believe that not creating an account helps privacy in any way. In this case, it does not. 👉 Going forward, I am going to create an account whenever I can. At least it allows me to set a password, preventing others from creating an account with my e-mail address. My password manager can remember a LOT of unique passwords.

TL;DR: If you enter your e-mail address on a site, your activities can be linked to you, so you have an account, even if you cannot log in. The cloud remembers. ☁️🐘

This post was first published on Linkedin here on 2025-11-01.