>>>do you think Google was simply pulling a static image of that site from a Google cache in the cloud....or did Google actually (unbeknownst to the person) access www.adultsite.com, and show a stripped down version of the page "in real time"?
>
>On Android it's a small clipped image cached locally. Use of gmail bringing home sites to work? If the friend definitely never accessed porn at work, presumably it's another clipped image, so no porn site accesses to explain (presuming the work firewall/dsn allows access to porn in the first place.)
>
>Still slightly alarming if use of gmail also lets Google record how many hours per day the friend spends on adultsite.com, especially if google terms and conditions allow mining of this data for sale. And IF gmail is snooping this stuff, using a VPN and clearing browser caches is no longer the recipe for privacy that it ought to be. The only good news is that if gmail can snoop other tabs that are supposed to be isolated, then so can a hacker so there's no guarantee the mechanism gmail uses won't be foxed in the next patch... all this assuming that the friend didn't actually browse the porn site at work, of course.

Using gmail in outlook as POP3 is an option - then use something like TOR Browser for browsing instead of Google Chrome.