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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 Lester on Tuesday July 09 2019, @05:55PM (1 child)
In Spain, Amazon has no legal reason to keep my purchases after 5 years. Maybe it is debatable, but google? what legal reason has google have data about me?
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Tuesday July 09 2019, @06:26PM
This "Purchase History" feature is part of Gmail now. If you used Gmail as your communication method with a 3rd party retailer/company then it is a record created to deliver that functionality of the service.
I can easily see how a Google lawyer could make a point that they believe they are in compliance with the GDPR on this issue because it is part of the core functionality of that feature.
It might not be a feature of the service people want, but unless they offer the ability to turn it off, the only option is to stop using Gmail when communicating with other companies you're doing business with.