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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: 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