Google keeps track of your purchases for years, based on email receipts you’ve received through Gmail. Price, delivery address, description, vendor, and other information are stored by Google.
Removing this personal information will be a time-consuming process, especially if you have a big record of purchases. We’ll quickly go through how you may reclaim your privacy in this post.
Google is keeping track of everything you’ve ever purchased via email receipts.
When you’re logged into your Google account, go to Purchases to see what Google has saved about your purchases.
If you wish to delete your purchase history, you’ll also have to delete the emails (receipts) from which Google is scraping the data. As a result, it’s impossible to save your email receipts without also allowing Google to scrape them.
Because Gmail does not secure your data, this type of tracking and profiling is feasible. All of the information you store in your Gmail account is visible to the corporation, which can filter it and use it.
How Google keeps track of your purchases
Google pulls crucial information from your purchase email receipts to generate a purchase history tied to your account. Price, currency, delivery address, description, vendor, and other categories are used to organise the information.
This shopping list contains a lot of personal data, and it’s possible that Google will use it to build a profile of you and your shopping habits.
While Google claims that it does not utilise any information from Gmail conversations to serve advertising, including the email receipts and confirmations displayed on the Purchase page, there is no guarantee that this information is not used for ad optimization.
After all, Google’s business strategy is to know everything about you so that they can provide you targeted adverts when you’re online. While Google is attempting to address growing privacy concerns, its economic model has stayed intact, which is in direct opposition to a truly privacy-friendly strategy.
This purchase history is yet another Google ‘feature’ that appears to be designed for someone other than the consumers – no one knows that such a purchase history exists in their accounts – but for someone else.
How to delete your purchasing history
- From the Google Purchases page, select a purchase you want to delete.
- At the bottom of the payment detail page, select Remove Purchase.
- To remove the purchase in the history, you need to delete the email receipt. Select View Email to open the matching email for this purchasing item.
- The email opens in your Gmail account. Select the trash icon to delete it.
- Repeat step 1 to 4 for each purchasing item in your history.
- The next time Google performs a scan of your inbox for purchases, every deleted purchase will be removed from your purchases history.
While there are guidelines available that describe how to prevent Google from scanning your receipt emails in order to construct a purchase history, this configuration is meaningless.
After all, Google will still have access to all of your receipt emails and can scan them to generate a purchase history, whether or not you want this list to be shown in your account.
Stopping using Gmail is the only method to properly prevent Google from constructing a shopping list based on your receipt emails.
Source: Tutanota
