Forgot to mention, I'm a Googler, but I don't work on search, ads, or YouTube. My opinions and thoughts are my own. I posted an ad for my family name a few yea

Forgot to mention, I'm a Googler, but I don't work on search, ads, or YouTube. My opinions and thoughts are my own. I posted an ad for my family name a few years ago. I was applying for new jobs and I wanted some say in what prospective employers saw about me online. I think it was 5 cents per click that I ended up paying. It's cheap enough that it's probably worth paying for them. And going through this process for yourself you can see what the targeting options are. As for how your name got in there, who knows. Maybe you searched for yourself accidentally. Maybe it was able to get it from your account name. But it's unlikely that the data was "sold" to YourNameOnATShirt.com. This wouldn't really make much business sense, the privacy policies explicitly say this won't happen, and I've never heard of anyone with actual knowledge claiming that any personal data is ever sold. It looks like you can opt out of this kind of ad personalization here though: https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated