Google tracks a whole lot of everything you purchase, even if you bought it from somewhere else, such as purchasing from a store or Amazon.
Last week, CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a New York Times op-ed that stated: “privacy cannot be a luxury good.” However, behind the scenes, Google remains collecting much personal info from the services that you use, like Gmail, and some of it can’t be readily deleted.
“To help you easily view and keep track of your purchases, bookings, and subscriptions in one place, we’ve created a private destination that can only be seen by you,” Google told The Verge in a declaration. “You can delete this information at any time. We don’t use any information from your Gmail messages to serve you ads, and that includes the email receipts and confirmations shown on the Purchase page.” Google didn’t say how long this tool has been at work.
According to CNBC, the company says it does not use this data for customized advertisement tracking; Google announced back in 2017 it would stop using information collected from Gmail messages to personalize ads. You can even delete the information from the Purchases webpage, but you must do this individually for each listed transaction.
You can see your purchase history here.
Google says it doesn’t use your Gmail to show you advertisements and promises it “does not sell your personal information, which includes your Gmail and Google Account information,” and “does not share your personal information with advertisers unless you have asked us to.”
Google will only continue to face analysis for tools that show the accurate measure of the company’s depth of knowledge that it has stored from its users. Repairing its image will need more than the pledges of an executive on stage in a developer conference. Even if it’s not used for advertisements, there’s no apparent reason why Google would have to monitor our purchase history and make it difficult to delete that info. Google says it’s looking into simplifying its configurations to make them easier to control, nevertheless.