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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: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday July 09 2019, @08:20PM

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Tuesday July 09 2019, @08:20PM (#865132)

    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