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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, @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]