Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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/


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday July 10 2019, @01:04AM (1 child)

    by curunir_wolf (4772) on Wednesday July 10 2019, @01:04AM (#865243)

    My only other option besides Verizon FIOS would be Comcast, and around here they are slow(er), much less reliable, and probably have the same issues with the SMTP.

    The setup here is really eclectic. I have domain registration with one place, DNS service with another (Zonomi - really good, recommend those guys), and I like hosting everything right here on a VM or two with and an R-Pi for some critical services to keep things running when the VM host is down. Totally do not need a full web hosting service.

    There are some places that do just basic email forwarding for a custom domain, which is all I'm missing. I had narrowed that down to one or two but never actually pulled the trigger on one of them. Probably have to research again to find one. Soon.

    --
    I am a crackpot
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 10 2019, @11:50AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday July 10 2019, @11:50AM (#865343)

    Yeah, we're stuck here with "choice" of Comcast and AT&T, and Comcast is the lesser evil - but, we only use them for access and DNS.

    My full web host is FAR more expensive than I need, I've got the same provider since 1997 and it's easy to be lazy, they've only cost me about
      2 hours of un-necessary reconfig work in the last 22 years - so there's value in that. If I shopped the deal I could possibly save over 50%, maybe as much as $8 a month less - it's hard to get motivated to do all the work of migration for $8 a month.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]