Element14 & RS Components silently linking unrelated accounts

[liteyear]

We've long battled Element14's impenetrable logic of associating individual accounts with business/credit cards/trade accounts/other accounts. I thought it was all finally behind us since I abandoned a long used, but ultimately borked, account and started a fresh one. The fresh one was intended to cast off the junk associations of the previous one and start anew with a new business name and email address.

I've just discovered that an ex-colleague at an old job from >4 years ago has a record on their order history of every order I've placed with my new account.

What madness is this? Are we just really lucky, or have others experienced unwanted account linking?

I wonder if this issue ("undesirable feature") is not just Element14 - for a long time each of our individual RS Components accounts my employees have created all somehow manage to send order confirmations to a single, unrelated, now defunct, email address. I only know because all email to invalid addresses at my domain go to me. None of us have ever deliberately linked accounts, and we'd prefer they weren't, so this is some magic matching that RS Components is doing.

In the RS case the results aren't undesirable, so I've never bothered to investigate, but in general it's a major concern than account information is being leaked to other accounts without our preference.