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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 09 2019, @12:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the never-give-up-the-data dept.

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/


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  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday July 09 2019, @06:44PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 09 2019, @06:44PM (#865095) Homepage Journal

    They have been doing this in Holland a long time ago -- but not to track spending habits. Currency has its serial number recorded as a bar code. All paper money goes through the central bank regularly, and the bank checks if any serial numbers show up more often than plausible. If it does, they investigate, because those bills are likely counterfeit.

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