How Google uses Gmail to track a history of things you buy

Google has a “Purchases” page that shows your purchases based on receipts you have in your Gmail inbox; Google says only you can view your purchases Google saves years of information on purchases you've made, even outside Google, and pulls this information from Gmail. More: The Verge, BetaNews, Daring Fireball, Android Central, gHacks Technology News, The Next Web, SlashGear, Gizmodo, CNET, Business Insider, BuzzFeed News, Engadget, MSPoweruser, Financial Times, and Fast Company

The purchase history here is just...

Has everything from what I bought for lunch at a sushi counter yesterday, to movies I've seen years ago, to Candy Crush upgrades, and what appears to be every single Amazon purchase I've made dating back to 2013https://t.co/GPB1E8nteM

— mat honan (@mat) May 17, 2019

Google showed off some amazing, inspiring stuff at the last IO, but their gaslighting over privacy shows they still don’t respect their own users or business model enough to be honest about what they do. https://t.co/FQyJdRNVFy

— Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) May 17, 2019

at some point the notion of “collecting all this data improves your ad experience” is just silly. there’s no reason to have this much stored information. there should be limited time periods to store such information before auto deleting. it should be default. https://t.co/aqRPTuMQgO

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) May 17, 2019

Google uses Gmail to track a history of things you buy — and it’s hard to delete https://t.co/9NFXweepnR #privacy

— Thexyz (@thexyz) May 18, 2019

My key issue with this weird outrage https://t.co/dDQYsoGcVK is that Google already has all those and any other emails that come into Gmail, stored on its servers. And "reads" ALL OF THEM to help you deal with spam.

1/3

— Stasys Bielinis (@Staska) May 18, 2019