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Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Way back in December 2018, we reported that Google was building a creepy profile of everything people purchase by scanning their emails in Gmail. In that report, we covered ways to delete this purchase history which included deleting the order data directly from your Gmail inbox. Now a new report is claiming that deleting emails doesn't work and there's actually no way to delete this Google purchase history.
The report from CNBC's Todd Haselton says that he deleted 10 years worth of emails from his Gmail inbox in order to clear his Google purchase history. However, three weeks after deleting all the email, his purchase history is still there. He adds that he can't delete anything from this list of purchases and he can't stop Google adding his recent purchases to this list.
Google says that unlinking your subscriptions and changing the activity settings for other Google services can reduce the purchase history data that's collected. However, it doesn't provide any specific examples of which subscription settings or activity settings to change in order to stop this purchase data being collected.
Additionally, since Google's recommendation of deleting purchase receipts from your Gmail inbox doesn't appear to work, these other recommendations may also do little to prevent purchase data from being collected.
Source: https://reclaimthenet.org/google-gmail-purchase-history-cannot-be-deleted/
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 09 2019, @12:43PM (12 children)
If there truly is (currently) no way to delete a purchase history, it's good that this is coming to light quickly, and it should also be rectified quickly - with yet another incomprehensibly complex privacy preference setting... somewhere in your Google profile.
Better than finding out 5 years hence that your purchase history was sold to Cambridge Analytica and is the reason that your job recruiters have only been offering you positions which have no human interaction.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Tuesday July 09 2019, @12:55PM (10 children)
I have a better solution:
1. Don't log in to Google. Ever. Easy peasy.
2. Profit!
This includes not using their
surveillanceemail platform. There are plenty of other *free* webmail-based email platforms that don't spy on you. Protonmail, anyone?Or, you can just use an actual email client and keep all your emails locally -- optionally on an iMAP server whose hardware you own and control.
Easy peasy.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 4, Informative) by stormreaver on Tuesday July 09 2019, @01:34PM (1 child)
When this story first broke, I checked my Google history. It knew about my Google searches, Youtube, and my Play Store purchases. Those are all things I expected and wanted Google to know.
You are absolutely correct about never using any Google service for anything you don't want it to know. For that matter, don't use any third party service if you want to keep your information away from it. Not a single purchase, aside from what I mentioned above, was listed on Google. That's most likely because I don't use GMail as my primary email address. I run Postfix on my own dedicated server ($12/month for a dedicated server) using secure POP to download all new email to my local machine every few minutes, so Google (and everyone else who isn't an actual recipient or the NSA) knows nothing about them.
I create a different email address for EVERYONE, which also solves my spam problem.
Transparency isn't the answer. The answer is to stop using third party surveillance services.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday July 09 2019, @08:20PM
In fact, having a tracked history inside of Google/Amazon/etc sounds like a great way to give yourself a normal looking purchase history buying the same boring shit that everyone buys online.
Now, anyone looking at my purchase history sees what they want to see, and doesn't bother look deeper to find that I paid cash for amazon gift cards at a grocery store to then pay for a VPN provider to get torrents.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 09 2019, @02:46PM (7 children)
I lived this life from 1996 through about 2006, it was anything but easy peasy. Locally stored e-mails get lost, aren't available on the new computer unless you take care to transfer them, if you live the life you know the pain.
Maybe if I ever get around to maintaining my own personal cloud presence I could go back to it - have my own webmail service. The value of gmail to me is that it has been consistently "there" since I started using it. This is also true of Yahoo mail which I started using slightly before gmail, but Yahoo hasn't inspired as much confidence about consistent availability into the future as Google, and while alternatives like Proton exist, some even with a long track history, it's that future uncertainty that bothers me.
Google has snooped my flight reservations, amazon purchases, etc. for over 20 years now. I hope they've gotten enough value from doing so to make it worth their while to continue providing free e-mail service into the future - I certainly know it's worth a lot to me to not have to maintain my whole family's e-mail infrastructure the way I used to back in the 1990s.
Now, if it ever comes out that Google has been feeding my cellphone number to telemarketers - I think a 350KT W78 delivered by Minuteman to Mountain View wouldn't be a strong enough response.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Tuesday July 09 2019, @03:25PM (6 children)
I have also done so since 1996. And never stopped. And never lost an email. I still have most of them (except for the spam and some commercial emails I don't need any more, plus attachments I exported and then deleted from the mail archive), all 14GB of them.
I had some issues back in the late 2000's where my SMTP server would get blackholed as a spam server, but that hasn't happened in a very, very long time. What's more, that's irrelevant to the discussion, as I could always just have used my ISP's MTA, but I prefer my own, with STARTTLS enabled by default.
But it *is* easy peasy. Maybe not for the hoi polloi, but for anyone who is even minimally tech savvy.
There are mail servers (whether they be MTAs, MSAs with webmail interfaces/clients or both) that you can simply drop in on a VM or old hardware with minimal configuration.
As for the "value" Google provides, no amount of money is worth my privacy. You've made a different calculation WRT that, and I have no issue with your decision.
You knew the score and made the decision that your information was owned by Google and not by you. That was your decision to make.
But you won't get a lot of sympathy from me if you start pissing and moaning about how you're being spied upon.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday July 09 2019, @05:27PM (4 children)
I've done the same, but a couple of years ago Verizon decided to completely disable any option to send emails. Well, not ANY option - I could switch to using a @verizon.net email address and use their web interface to send them. But my current email addresses? Nope.
I'm looking into various SMTP services, and will probably subscribe to one at some point. Until then, if I want to send an email, it goes through a gmail or yahoo account. Email is simply no longer free, as you claim. It's either your dollars or your privacy.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Tuesday July 09 2019, @05:57PM
I'm with you. That really blows.
For many (>20) years, I've had an ISP that is server friendly and even gives me free static IPV4 addresses. Sadly, it's a DSL provider, and as such is pretty slow.
Last year, I decided to look into it, and found that I could have cable Internet *plus* the cable TV for which I was already paying, for less than the cable TV plan I was on. I did so, and now get better than 200Mb/sec down and ~10Mb/sec up with it.
However, I kept my existing ISP specifically so I could continue to use my own mail/web/DNS servers and host my own domains locally. I did receive an actual snail-mail letter from them a couple weeks ago stating that they had filed for bankruptcy, so that may put this in jeopardy (although, that happened with a couple other incarnations of the ISP servicing my link and they were inevitably picked up by someone else, so I may be okay).
That said, this is the problem with all the consolidation and duo/tri-opolies in most places in the US for wireline Internet. These guys want to make internet connections content distribution channels rather than peer nodes.
We need to fight that. But that's a much longer and more difficult discussion.
As I mentioned, you can use services like Protonmail [protonmail.com] which provides full, end-to-end encryption for reading and receiving mail. It also provides encrypted storage (you manage your own keys, so they have no access either) on their servers.
Other free mail services likely offer this level (or less) of encryption and don't spy on you either.
You definitely have to work harder, but you *can* have email that isn't spying on you.
The question really becomes, "how much is my privacy worth to me?"
Once you can answer that question, you can make rational decisions about what sorts of services you want to use.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 09 2019, @09:53PM (2 children)
We told Verizon to F themselves in 2013 and haven't ever looked back.
I've never had terribly good experiences with SMTP through web hosts, blacklist issues, server upgrades that break my config, etc. You can make it work, but as you say, you have to pay. On the other hand, I think some of the cheaper webhosting sites are something like $45 for a 3 year contract these days, including all the e-mail support you'd ever need.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday July 10 2019, @01:04AM (1 child)
My only other option besides Verizon FIOS would be Comcast, and around here they are slow(er), much less reliable, and probably have the same issues with the SMTP.
The setup here is really eclectic. I have domain registration with one place, DNS service with another (Zonomi - really good, recommend those guys), and I like hosting everything right here on a VM or two with and an R-Pi for some critical services to keep things running when the VM host is down. Totally do not need a full web hosting service.
There are some places that do just basic email forwarding for a custom domain, which is all I'm missing. I had narrowed that down to one or two but never actually pulled the trigger on one of them. Probably have to research again to find one. Soon.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 10 2019, @11:50AM
Yeah, we're stuck here with "choice" of Comcast and AT&T, and Comcast is the lesser evil - but, we only use them for access and DNS.
My full web host is FAR more expensive than I need, I've got the same provider since 1997 and it's easy to be lazy, they've only cost me about
2 hours of un-necessary reconfig work in the last 22 years - so there's value in that. If I shopped the deal I could possibly save over 50%, maybe as much as $8 a month less - it's hard to get motivated to do all the work of migration for $8 a month.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 09 2019, @09:44PM
As the Aussies say: G'danya.
I never lost an e-mail from the beginning of time through 2003, when I entrusted my company laptop to the IT department for an upgrade from Win98 to whatever was next... told the guy: "only thing I care about are my e-mails, you can let the rest of the files go, but save the mails." Reply was something to the effect of: BS BS BS "do it all the time will migrate" BS BS BS "don't worry, simplest thing ever to do, we've got you covered." Three hours later, I had my laptop back with the OS upgraded and, if you haven't guessed yet you've never worked with corporate IT, the last 3 years of e-mail completely vanished, unrecoverable, gone forever. It was actually quite liberating, I used to answer a lot of questions with "I've got that in an old e-mail, I'll look it up for you..." and suddenly I could, without a shred of guilt, answer "nope, sorry, can't help with that - ask IT why."
I continued to manage mine and my wife's home e-mail on ageing Eudora clients which worked quite well, but I had already started migrating most of my personal e-mail traffic to G-mail, and it was quite a bit easier, particularly as I hopped from work to home to other PCs. I setup POP3 and IMAP clients, migrated and consolidated archives, Eudora's search functions literally kicked MS-Office's ass, but Gmail search and spam filtering was just a little bit better, and so much less work. Getting my wife off Eudora was a matter of convincing her to learn something new... once she did, having her on Gmail really took a load off, particularly anytime she got a new PC (which has been about 6 since the migration to Gmail.)
I had some of that around the 2000-2004 timeframe also with my ISP, and just recently they've done something that has completely borked our POP3 access - but since we're 99.999947% migrated off of them it just doesn't matter.
If you enjoy it, maybe. I've got other things I'd rather do on the tech-hobby front with my time, and if you're honest with yourself, you are spending quite a bit of time managing your e-mail yourself instead of surrendering to the all seeing eye.
We don't do much facebook around here, my wife might take a few too many photos of her food to share for my taste, but otherwise we're not much into self-promotion. On the other hand, we generally invite people to learn more about our private lives because we're well past the "nothing to hide" stage and into the "you wanna take a closer look at this shitshow? Please do, we're proud of how we've managed the impossible challenges, and if you can in any way help us make things better, you are absolutely invited to make suggestions" territory.
I used to develop closed source software for sale, so that needed to be kept secure, but having Google manage our e-mail doesn't impact that in any way at all. Lately, on the rare occasions I have time, I develop with open source in mind instead - again, it's easier than protecting secrets and building in lock mechanisms, and if someone wants to "steal my great inventions" more power to 'em, I've made better stuff in the past and I know that the value of these better mousetraps is in direct proportion to the amount invested in promotion, so if you're stealing my shit - that's free promotion for me. If I kept it all for myself I know I don't have enough spare resources to promote it into being worth anything significant anyway.
Anybody who doesn't realize the degree to which Google "reads your mail" is just absolutely clueless. Ads show up for the things you're talking about in your mail, both what you type and what other people have typed to you... those reminders that your flight leaves in 3 hours and it's time for you to start driving to the airport (based on your current location)... most of it is cheap parlor tricks, and I really don't care or "value" it much at all, though one of those flight reminders might have kept me from missing a flight once.
Unless your correspondents use PGP with you, e-mail is like an open post-card, free for anyone in the mail system to read. And, if they do, what kind freaky shit are you and your friends into that's worth that extra effort? I like to say that using stuff like that, and TOR, is the best way to get yourself on the top of the investigators' "people to look closer at" list.
I developed, and proudly announced to the US government, a steganography app which I tested against a number of steanography detectors which couldn't tell that there was any hidden info in the .png images. At the time, our company had annual "security briefing" visits from the local FBI office, and, yet, now almost 10 years later, nobody has ever said peep about it. Maybe I'm on a watchlist, but if I am they have been VERY inconspicuous about it, and the FBI was hardly inconspicuous when conducting our security audits after the briefings. Anyway, point being, I have this great tool for communicating "under the radar" out of sight of even people who look for encrypted communications, I've spammed out a bunch of "Ha, there's a secret message here" images to public boards just to do it, but, in reality, it's one of the most useless apps I ever made, except for the fact that in 2012 a guy gave me a bitcoin for a copy of it - $4 at the time, and I made a whopping 5625% on that deal - got a whole $225 for it in 2013, too bad I didn't also invest another $4000 in BTC at the time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday July 09 2019, @08:17PM
So... what do I need to buy to get one of these jobs?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh