GMAIL TRACKS EVERYTHING YOU PURCHASE AND YOU CAN'T STOP IT

Google claimed that your personal shopping data could be deleted if you didn’t want the company to know everything that you bought online. But, in practice, deleting purchases is not so easy. Purchases cannot be deleted in bulk, and the only way to remove an item from the purchases page is to delete the email from your Gmail inbox.

If this wasn't bad enough, Todd Haselton from CNBC who first reported on this story, went through his Gmail inbox to delete every single purchase email to see for a fact if this would remove his data. One by one he managed to delete all the purchase emails in order to remove the purchases from his Purchases page. He went back three weeks later and found that the Purchases page still has a list of all his purchases, going back years, even after he deleted the emails. This is particularly concerning as it indicates that Purchases aren’t just being pulled from Gmail, but rather they must be cached or stored elsewhere.

Between Haselton’s experience of deleted emails not deleting Purchases items, and our experience of items more than one-month-old being hidden, it seems that it is essentially impossible to permanently delete these records. Google keeps a record of every single item you purchase, from any source, if a recognisable receipt is sent to your Gmail address.

This is yet another example of Google’s dismissive attitude to user privacy, despite its claims to the contrary.

Source: Digital Trends