51 ms·

Google keeps records of everything you buy, even if you delete the email receipt

743 points by decrypt 5y ago

themodelplumber 5y ago
Wow. It's not even just everything you buy from Google--from the post it seems like they actively compile and organize the data from every purchaser transaction that touches your GMail account. I think we deserve to hear from Google about this one. Unless we have already?
- nemasu 5y ago
  I wonder if it's to get that fancy header at the top of purchase emails.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    They wouldn't have to store the data after the email was deleted if that was the only reason.
- kreeben 5y ago
  "We're organizing the world's information and making it searchable [so that we can show you ads]."
  - prepend 5y ago
    “And dynamically price things based on your income and calculated demand”
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Wow. It's not even just everything you buy from Google--from the post it seems like they actively compile and organize the data from every purchaser transaction that touches your GMail account. IIRC, that's why Amazon purchase emails are utterly useless now. They realized Google was getting their precious customer data via Gmail, so they cut off the flow years ago. It's another example of how the modern economy has many consumer-hostile incentives that have actually led to regressions rather than improvements.
  - standardUser 5y ago
    Huh, I suppose that's why I sometimes have to click through several different Amazon emails to find the specific order or shipment I'm looking for. They've removed the details from the actual email.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > Huh, I suppose that's why I sometimes have to click through several different Amazon emails to find the specific order or shipment I'm looking for. They've removed the details from the actual email. Yeah, and there's nothing you can do. I don't even use gmail anymore, and the emails are still garbage. I think for awhile they used to include a truncated name of one of the products in the order, but it looks like they even removed that (sometime around August 2019, based on my emails). Unrelated observation: in my original comment I added a second paragraph noting that this regression was due to the incentives caused by modern capitalism (and it is: owners trying to extract maximum value for themselves, even if that means hurting their customers), and it immediately started getting downvoted. Then I change "capitalism" to "economy" and it started going up again. Some people are really sensitive. It must be blasphemy to criticize the invisible hand and the wisdom of the owners ti guides. I guess right is whatever they do.
      - space_fountain 5y ago
        Could also be that they just want you back on their site because some ab test at some point decided you're more likely to be buy from them again if they can get you back onto amazon.com
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      It benefits them in many ways. Good luck figuring out where a random Amazon box was ordered from if there are multiple buyers in your household.
    - 5y ago
- kelp 5y ago
  The first time I heard about Gmail collecting your purchase history, I moved to Fastmail and I've been pretty happy. Downside is Gmail search is a lot better than Fastmail's. But otherwise it's worked great.
  - Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
    Gmail Search is getting subpar now than it was before. It didn't show the email that I knew the subject, or the body have that. Sometimes I have added the email address or several names to get it to find the email. Sometimes it works. 5 years ago, it has no problem finding those emails. And now, it is hit and miss. This is on my Google Workplace account.
  - hpkuarg 5y ago
    I've been a happy Fastmail user for years as well, but now am looking to switch away due to the Australian surveillance bill.
- peakaboo 5y ago
  In 2021, I'm surprised people expect Google to give you privacy.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  >It's not even just everything you buy from Google--from the post it seems like they actively compile and organize the data from every purchaser transaction that touches your GMail account. Google literally buys a copy of most people's credit card transaction data. >Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases. https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-now-tracks-your-credit-card-purchases-and-connects-them-to-its-online-profile-of-you/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...
- samstave 5y ago
  Drat!!! Google knows all about my dealings with Nigerian Princes!! I'm ruined!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rtomanek 5y ago
Does this show up in Google Takeout export?
- tdeck 5y ago
  That's what the article says.
- decrypt 5y ago
  Yes, from the toot, all of this data is visible on a Google Takeout export.
- tillinghast 5y ago
  > Here's metadata from my takeout showing … Apparently. Haven't tested myself yet.
aj3 5y ago
Well duh. They have to comply with anti-money laundering regulation.
- nemasu 5y ago
  This was my first thought too. But it seems like any purchase, even if Google isn't involved, is logged.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Do they? They’re not the ones actually moving the money in this scenario. Generally KYC and AML laws apply to the actual banks or money transmitter, which sometimes is Google if you use their payment services, but not if it’s just their email.
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  What does AML have to do with what I buy online?
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Anyone who transmits your money, including CC companies, have to comply with KYC and AML laws. I believe this might include Google Pay, but I don’t see how this would include Gmail for cases where you didn’t use Google Pay.
    - hungryforcodes 5y ago
      Where? You mean in America? It's really not needed where I am. Also rather doubt I need to pass KYC to buy a burger and fries from a food delivery service in the US.
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        I’m only familiar with American laws, but KYC and AML laws are not a uniquely American thing. The EU has similar directives, although I'm sure the implementations differ. And yes, if you bought burgers and fries in the US you actually did pass KYC/AML laws, you are just completely unaware of it. The KYC (know your customer) laws applied when you created your financial account, your bank is obligated to check your identity before creating an account, and the AML laws are about monitoring financial transactions for something fishy. Here in the US, you need a paper trail for deposits greater than $10k, and banks are on the lookout for “structured” deposits that side step this requirement. So buying a burger occasionally is fine, but if you started buying $15k worth of burgers a month, you’ll start tripping financial systems wondering if you’re doing something illegal. As a practical matter, this is one reason why people joke about cash only businesses being a front. A cash only laundromat or restaurant is a fantastic way to clean dirty money for use in the us market.
clscott 5y ago
Worse, the stores are feeding them this info in easy to digest packets: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference
c16 5y ago
If you don't pay for the product then YOU are the product.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
Very unlikely that they keep the record indefinitely after you delete the email. Instead, it's likely that the systems that store the derived information are not transactionally connected to the email database. Deletions would be reflected eventually, but only according to the periodicity with which the two systems are synchronized.
- junon 5y ago
  And what makes you think this is the case? Or is it speculation?
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention?hl=en-US https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention?hl=en-US > When you delete data in your Google account, we immediately start the process of removing it from the product and our systems. First, we aim to immediately remove it from view and the data may no longer be used to personalize your Google experience. For example, if you delete a video you watched from your My Activity dashboard, YouTube will immediately stop showing your watch progress for that video. > We then begin a process designed to safely and completely delete the data from our storage systems. Safe deletion is important to protect our users and customers from accidental data loss. Complete deletion of data from our servers is equally important for users’ peace of mind. This process generally takes around 2 months from the time of deletion. This often includes up to a month-long recovery period in case the data was removed unintentionally. > Each Google storage system from which data gets deleted has its own detailed process for safe and complete deletion. This might involve repeated passes through the system to confirm all data has been deleted, or brief delays to allow for recovery from mistakes. As a result, deletion could sometimes take longer when extra time is needed to safely and completely delete the data. > Our services also use encrypted backup storage as another layer of protection to help recover from potential disasters. Data can remain on these systems for up to 6 months.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      This does not say what you are implying above - this talks about a formal data deletion request, not just deleting the email.
sneak 5y ago
Of course they do. Gmail's logs of essentially your entire economic activity (travel, flights, driving directions, online orders, food delivery, etc), tied to your identity, is the most valuable thing Google has as an advertiser. (They even buy purchase logs from retailers, tied to phone numbers; recall that you can't get a Google Account without a phone number.) This is why Amazon started somewhat redacting the transactional emails they send out when you buy stuff. Only a fool would use Gmail.
hamburglar 5y ago
Why on earth would anyone think deleting an email would make google remove the info they've gathered on you?
stavros 5y ago
If you own your email domain, it takes all of fifteen minutes to move to something like Fastmail. You just switch the MX records, run a GMail import, and you're done. Plus, Fastmail's UI is much faster than GMail's.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
  Yeah, and GMail might lose a few hundred users!
  - stavros 5y ago
    If you don't own your domain, email is probably not very important to you, so just set up an autoresponder to tell people to update to your new address and forward the mail to your new provider.
    - jiveturkey 5y ago
      > If you don't own your domain, email is probably not very important to you, Or, you're part of the 95-99% for whom email and the Internet is of critical importance but because of the ease of access, and the technical minutiae, and generally misplaced trust in corporations, you never learn why this might matter. Sorry to say it, but I find your comment condescending.
- decrypt 5y ago
  Very much this. I am a happy Migadu user today. Works on any IMAP-compatible app. I have a domain for myself, and one for my parents. I want to move my extended family to a custom domain. It's even possible for them to create a new Google account with that custom domain for all Google things besides Gmail, yet I imagine a lot of push back to this idea.
- tW4r 5y ago
  Additionally, if you’re in the Apple ecosystem, they introduced custom email domains for iCloud this month with iOS 15 with their cheapest iCloud+ plan for 0.99
- 5y ago
Rompect 5y ago
Water is wet
- goohle 5y ago
  Sky is blue.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
function_seven 5y ago
Amazon's order status emails ("Shipped", "Out for Delivery", etc.) used to show the items in the order and how much I paid for them. They stopped doing that[0] last year presumably because of evil behavior like this. [0] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/06/01/unhelpful-amazon-order-confirmation-e-mails/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/06/01/unhelpful-amazon-order-co...
- minsc__and__boo 5y ago
  I can almost guarantee Amazon dropped the item details from their emails in order to get you to click back into the store.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    yea i like this take better. facebook used to include message or comment content in notification emails. it was nice to get updates without having to log on to their horrible GUI. but of course they cant make ad impressions if i never log on… their emails no longer contain content of comments.
  - homerunnerhome 5y ago
    I work for another retail where we discussed this same topic, and during that discussion I talked to some of my friends at Amazon and I would bet a lot of money that your guarantee is wrong. From what they told me, the decision to remove info from the emails was a company-wide campaign that was specifically created as a result of this [0] NYTimes article, which specifically calls out Google snooping on Amazon shopper data. I'm sure the advertising PMs were happy to support this decision because it got them more page clicks, but my understanding is that the underlying motive was privacy. 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/opinion/google-purchases.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/opinion/google-purchases....
    - bagacrap 5y ago
      privacy, or moat building? I don't consider it a breach of privacy for Gmail to index my purchases in order to show me more relevant ads and help provide a free service. And I definitely want to be able to search that index myself, like if I know I bought a product but can't remember from who or when it was, it sure would be nice to be able to search my Gmail for it.
kobieyc 5y ago
This is an example of why I moved off Gmail to ProtonMail
lizknope 5y ago
I remember when Google Mail launched on April Fool's Day in 2004. I thought the 1GB of storage for email was a prank because it was a huge amount to offer for free. I made an account just to try it out but then I saw all the advertisements it added. Seeing ads based on the content of my email was really creepy. I stopped using Gmail and now I pay Fastmail for my email. It seems worth it to me.
gsich 5y ago
Of course, there is/was a feature that showed you your recent transactions, delivery notices.
decrypt 5y ago
From the same tooter: >If you use #Google Photos, there's a non-zero chance that there are secret, yet public URLs attached to your photos that allow un-authenticated access to every picture in your account. Mine did, and I tested the addresses in incognito and tor browsers and they worked. #privacy https://mastodon.social/@gerowen/106978306449754832 https://mastodon.social/@gerowen/106978306449754832
- judge2020 5y ago
  "unauthenticated access" is a stretch. It's like how rawgithubcontent links originating from GitHub.com on private repos contain a query parameter ?token= that is an API token for accessing that repo "without authentication" - it's in the URL, sure, but that URL itself contains a long, random series of characters that is needed to access the content.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  "Secret yet public" is a new achievement in privacy derangement. The URL is secret. It is public if you share it, after which it is not secret.
  - prepend 5y ago
    It’s also really hard to audit, so if Google shares it and people access it, Google won’t know. This is not cool for me because I don’t want my photos available to people other than me, even if they have my magic url with a token I didn’t create and can’t revoke.
    - kyle-rb 5y ago
      How is a magic url really any different from a magic login cookie in this case? Yeah, I guess you can't revoke it, but what's the difference if the new cookie/url is equally unguessable?
      - prepend 5y ago
        I create and revoke tokens, that’s a big difference. With magic urls, I don’t know they exist so I can’t share or control them.
stephc_int13 5y ago
This is why I stopped using Gmail years ago. It combines bad user experience with giving them too much power. Google is really not our friend.
pat-jay 5y ago
Is it overstated to say "this is creepy AF"?
pantulis 5y ago
Is Google Takeout only limited to GMail? I am pretty sure this transaction data can also be gathered via Analytics, so I guess there would be no foul play on the part of GMail. But of course, you are logged into your Google Profile because you use GMail.
- Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
  It is not limited to that, it encompassed everything under Google umbrella like Gmail, Search, Health, etc. They have multiple options that you can tick the data you want to obtain. To be warn, the folder itself can be absurdly large depending how entrenched you are in Google ecosystem. Last time I checked mine, it is over 50 GB.
rc_mob 5y ago
so you are saying we should , send ourselves some fake purchase receipts just to fuck with googles data?
- tomrod 5y ago
  Exactly this. Monkeywrench_Tech_as_a_Service.
barneygale 5y ago
Working for Google is outright unethical.
jsnell 5y ago
Isn't this controlled by the "Gmail smart features" setting, which they explicitly had a modal dialog for last year, to make everyone explicitly decide to enable or disable? https://blog.google/products/gmail/new-settings-smart-features-and-personalization-gmail/ https://blog.google/products/gmail/new-settings-smart-featur... Seems a bit odd for the poster to enable it, and then complain. The text seems fairly clear. Oh, wait... The screenshot shows the Takeout as being from 2019. Why post about it now?
- morsch 5y ago
  I assume they did that because they had to (GDPR, the blog post is tagged as Google in Europe, even if they did it worldwide). I think I opted in. In typical Google fashion, you had either the choice to enable everything or nothing. I want the tabbed inbox, I don't want smart compose, or assistant integration or... anything else from that post, really. They also lock all kinds of basic features of Google Maps (like manually set and store my home address) behind the permission to record, store and processes indefinitely my location history.
- throwdecro 5y ago
  > Isn't this controlled by the "Gmail smart features" setting... I just went through the Google's "Privacy Checkup" and it wasn't clear to me where this setting is. Also is the Takeout from 2019, or are there purchases from 2019 in a current Takeout? What specifically are you looking at in the screenshot?
  - jsnell 5y ago
    The name of the directory, shown in the top right, is google-takeout-20190313*. That's the time when the Takeout was exported.
osigurdson 5y ago
Google should offer a paid gmail service with a detailed privacy contract. Presumably they are not spying on businesses that pay for G Suite. Perhaps this already exists.
- paxys 5y ago
  You are describing Google Workspace
  - osigurdson 5y ago
    Isn't that just the new name for G Suite? What I am describing is a very simple workflow like the following: 1. Log in to gmail 2. Navigate to account settings 3. Select an "enhanced privacy" option 4. Enter a credit card number The user now owns all of their own content - no sharing without the user's permission.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Google has been offering that for years. It attracts the opposite complaint: a lot of the features you get with a gmail.com account don't work with the fancier accounts.
kyrra 5y ago
Googler, opinions are my own. Google has been doing this for a while, as can be seen when the reporters wrote about it 2 years ago: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18629789/google-purchase-history-gmail-email-receipts https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18629789/google-purchase-.... HN discussed it at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19942219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19942219 You can see the information it has already collected if you use Google, by visiting: https://myaccount.google.com/purchases https://myaccount.google.com/purchases Though oddly my list is empty. I wonder if I disabled this feature at some point? The help docs: https://support.google.com/accounts?p=orders&hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts?p=orders&hl=en, explain how you can delete this data if you want to.
- Eighth 5y ago
  I think it's more talking about gmail purchase records, which can be viewed here: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/category%3Apurchases https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/category%3Apurchase...
  - potatoman22 5y ago
    It's pretty deceptive that they don't disclose these are categorized and stored for advertising purposes. That's unethical IMO.
    - eth0up 5y ago
      On the About Gmail page, in large bold text is stated: "We never use your Gmail content for any ads purposes" emphasis mine. That might qualify as deceptive.
      - jsnell 5y ago
        Why do you think that this is being used for advertising purposes? Because HN user potatoman22 asserted that with no evidence?
jeffbee 5y ago
So forgive me for just being a slave to the downvotes, but this is the daily reminder to think critically. What I'd like to know from this user to clarify what's happening here is whether they are a Google Pay user, and if they have "Show bills & receipts from Gmail" enabled in Google Pay. It defaults to off, for what it's worth, but if you enable the feature it might have the effect of pinning this data even if the source emails are deleted.
dreyfan 5y ago
Edison [1] (who was acquired [2] today by a company that sells your data to hedge funds) does precisely this too, except they sell all your data to third parties. Google at least keeps it in-house I guess? Privacy is such an illusion. [1] https://mail.edison.tech/ https://mail.edison.tech/ [2] https://www.edison.tech/blog/edison-acquired-by-yipit https://www.edison.tech/blog/edison-acquired-by-yipit
- Eighth 5y ago
  'sell all your data to third parties' is an interesting claim for Edison as their marketing is very privacy conscious. Do you have sources for it? edit: ignore, I just read their privacy policy. God damn it. Can't trust anyone.
  - dreyfan 5y ago
    They've been doing it for years yeah. A decent source is https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkekmb/free-email-apps-spying-on-you-edison-slice-cleanfox https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkekmb/free-email-apps-spyin...
  - LudvigVanHassen 5y ago
    The edit is the correct response. Technology is awesome, but it's fallen into the hands of a bunch of god damn authoritarians. Trust absolutely no one. Paranoid should be your default behavior towards any files you have a device that accesses the Internet. There's 10,000 tentacles seeking that data.
- rapnie 5y ago
  There was a Tegenlicht [0] documentary on Dutch TV some weeks ago, on how pervasive data collection is 'revolutionising' how the stock exchanges and entire financial world operates. This data really is the new oil, and its analysis gives a headstart, advanced prior knowledge for traders that have early access. [0] https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/2021-2022/handel-in-voorkennis.html https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/... Translated from Dutch: "The stock market should be a level playing field: everyone has the same information. But unnoticed, terabytes of data have entered the stock market. Smart companies dive into the mountain of data that is collected about us, in order to be able to see Apple's sales or the number of Netflix subscribers before the rest of the market does. VPRO Tegenlicht delves into the world of 'alternative data' to see who will win on the stock market, and who will not." Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Demoneeri 5y ago
I'd expect nothing less, if I ask Google assistant about my last purchases, I expect it's going to show me the data. It's bad enough that Amazon doesn't include what you are purchasing in the email and that you have to open the site to see...
darthvoldemort 5y ago
I wish I could pay $20/month for Gmail without the spying and data collection, actual customer support, with a guarantee that my account wouldn't get locked because of one of their fucking mistakes.
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  fastmail is a fantastic email service, and much cheaper than that.
  - lom 5y ago
    It’s not only about gmail. The google suite is unbeatable in terms of functionality and UX.
    - rubyist5eva 5y ago
      GP said Gmail not GSuite. Also GSuite for a single user is also much cheaper than what he is asking for.
    - rubyist5eva 5y ago
      also, I personally find Google's design language atrocious
- reilly3000 5y ago
  I pay $11 / mo and have all of those things. GSuite/Workplace doesn’t run any ads or extraneous tracking, their corporate customers would never allow it.
  - afandian 5y ago
    I used to, before leaving for fastmail. But it's a joke to suggest that you get any meaningful support for your money. And I don't think that my account would get better treatment than a free one if they decided to delete it for some reason.
mysterydip 5y ago
Could fake/phishing emails be used to poison your profile? "Thanks for your constipation medication order"
reacharavindh 5y ago
Good thing they keep track of all the spam I get! The membership to something long forgotten, marketing emails from US shops(I don’t live in US anymore) and some developer mailing lists from that one time I had to write to get support. If they are so evil and clever, I at least make them work through a lot of bull shit before they profile me. My emails are at Fastmail as a paid user. Hopefully they are away from advertising companies. But, any Gmail user I have emailed would leak that info to Google.
- passivate 5y ago
  They do a good job of blocking email adverts/spam, but it also competes with their own paid service which shows the user adverts/spam. Okay, maybe I am a bit cynical :)
leephillips 5y ago
Google reads your Gmail. They admit it. They've never hidden it, as far as I know. If you choose to use Gmail, you've chosen to let Google's computers read, analyse, and store information about the contents of your email.
- jvolkman 5y ago
  All email providers that want customers analyze and store information about the content of emails so they can provide features such as spam filtering and search.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    Another reason for me to be glad that I don’t use an email provider. But is this true? Does Protonmail do this?
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      It appears so: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/spam-filtering/ https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/spam-filtering... (I work on Gmail, but that shouldn't really be relevant here)
      - leephillips 5y ago
        The link, and the custom filter page that it links to, only talk about filtering by sender address and subject line, not by email content. (Although the Subject header is part of the email body.)
- passivate 5y ago
  >If you choose to use Gmail, Google also does that if I don't use Gmail but send email to someone with a Gmail account, or send email to an address that forwards to a gmail account, etc.
  - 5y ago
reacharavindh 5y ago
I wish there was an online service that would let users poison their own data. Like allowing me to intentionally get emails about random stuff, shopping receipts etc from absurd entities just to throw the profilers off our scent. Would be fun. Same with something I can run Google Maps with my account logged in so that Google thinks I am one heck of a super traveler, and shopper of things. Something that watches random YouTube videos for me, and randomly clicks on ads for me.. :-) Uploads random photos into a Google Photos account for me :-) That’s be heck of a lot fun!
- decrypt 5y ago
  For search, I use TrackMeNot, a browser extension that makes random searches every few seconds: https://trackmenot.io/ https://trackmenot.io/
  - shultays 5y ago
    Semi related xkcd: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/packages.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/packages.png
  - dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
    This is very cool but I wonder how effective it is. I suspect Google can trivially discard the activity it generates?
- drdeadringer 5y ago
  What I'm hearing is that it's gotten so bad that people are now wanting email spam in order to combat data tracking, if not wanting email spam to combat email spam.
  - samstave 5y ago
    Has anyone else all of a sudden been getting a lot of actual spam delivered to their Gmail Inbox in the last ~3 weeks. I have been getting a lot. (a couple a week, which is a lot compared to zero for N years.) ((I was a customer of Postini before google bought them and integrated them into gmail as, IIRC, their spam system...))
yawaworht1978 5y ago
I have always wondered if google can see the YouTube, Gmail passwords, not from the database,but you can see your own passwords in the browser in plain text and since all the apps are theirs, a keylogger would be impossible to detect. Another thing is, do they have a back up of data from the Myaccount. Subdomain that users delete. Still I trust google and amazon more than Microsoft and apple and Facebook. Just me personal view, I could be totally wrong. The ones I trust are simply more open about data storage and have less dark patterns and clandestine TCS. But yes, wide spread Gmail usage will make google see many things and they will collect a lot of data. Probably even more delicate data than what Facebook gets to see.
kreeben 5y ago
User X: buys dildo Google: X likes dildos Dildo Salesperson: Google, who likes dildos? Google: X User X: deletes dildo receipt email Salesperson: Is X still into dildos? Google: Yeah, they just don't like receipts.
JohnFen 5y ago
This sort of nonsense is primarily why I avoid using Google products.
reilly3000 5y ago
I assume this is so they can stop retargeting you for stuff you’ve already purchased. Maybe also for general conversion tracking and market insights.
packeted 5y ago
Are google workspace accounts treated the same? I have several fill me domains hosted with Google duo curious if this behavior tracks over to their paid products
ipaddr 5y ago
Am I the only person who would never think to give google,facebook, twitter my credit card? Or would never pay them any money regardless? After linking your credit history the targeting and linking of information that would follow would be a privacy blackhole that would be hard to recover from.
afandian 5y ago
Not if you leave Google. You can do it.
deleted 5y ago
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heywherelogingo 5y ago
I love how people are surprised/shocked by this. It's perfectly in line with Google's character, yet every time another example of that character is highlighted people are still surprised. Perpetual surprise. Oh, this fire burnt my finger... oh, that fire burnt my finger... oh, yet another fire that burnt my finger... At what point do realise you're not going to find a cold fire?
zokier 5y ago
I'm kinda confused which part of this is news? That Google extracts purchase information from mails? That's a feature that's been even exposed in UI for ages! Or that Google uses incoming mail to enrich user profiles? I would have thought that to be obvious? If you put 1+1 together, then it seems pretty unsurprising that they have purchase histories of users. Maybe I'm just too jaded at this point
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Chloepeterson 5y ago
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ggalaxximm 5y ago
Who here is buying things with or through Google? Who actually has ever used "Google Pay"? Hell, I make it my religious duty to keep my GMAIL account under 15GB at all times, so I never, ever, ever have to reveal any of my banking information to Google. I would expect nothing less of Hacker News veterans.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  My understanding is if you have a receipt sent to your gmail account, google scrapes and tracks those purchases.
antattack 5y ago
I am pretty sure Microsoft is doing the same.
bengale 5y ago
Isn’t this largely the point of gmail? It’s a data collection tool isn’t it?
rastafang 5y ago
I wish stores and every other websites that require registration would stop requiring an email address in the process.
shapefrog 5y ago
Google knows fuck all compared to what Amex has on me.
- kreeben 5y ago
  Excellent rebuttal. I mean, who gives a fuck what Google does, when we 'av Amex's despicable conducture to worry 'bout, ey mate?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - shapefrog 5y ago
    Given the evil google data is the tiniest of tiny subsets of the 'everything you buy' data. Then yeah - not to mention the banks, ecommerce platforms, payment providers and card companies selling the data on to the highest bidder.
qualudeheart 5y ago
One of these days some simple soul is going to pick up purchase data for the rich and powerful and read it. Then the rich and powerful will be embarassed.
jrochkind1 5y ago
I don't understand what I'm looking at. What is this showing?
fuzzieozzie 5y ago
.. and this is why I have different email addresses for shopping.
kin 5y ago
Great, then it should stop advertising to me what it knows I just bought.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
It looks bad, but they need this info to optimize the spam filter
fn-mote 5y ago
I for one am very grateful to see Googlers coming out to post on this thread. PM of GMail?! Thank you. Replies here show a lot of animosity and distrust... not saying I disagree in general, but on this particular point the response from multiple levels has been unequivocal that "this is not happening", and I believe it.
floatingatoll 5y ago
This data capture alone was the sole factor that drove me to conclusively exit Gmail. There were many reasons I might have over the years, but this is what solidified feelings into actions for me.
lostmsu 5y ago
Why don't companies like Amazon who care about customer privacy have a field in the account settings, where you could post a public key of some kind (e.g. PGP or S/MIME), so that all email they send you would be encrypted?
entropicgravity 5y ago
Mine showed up nothing even though I buy things every now and then. Google offered to "search for other purchases in Gmail" but I declined. I would be interested to know what Google does do with information in my email account other than the email service.
oort-cloud9 5y ago
So what? Does not bother me what they know about my purchases.
olliej 5y ago
Google's harvesting of email data is why amazon, etc no longer include what you bought in emails that they send you.
kkodaxeroo 5y ago
I remember when you uninstalled Chrome, it opened your other default browser to display a webpage with the message "You have uninstalled Chrome. We're sorry to see you go!" That entire maneuver was just to plant tracking cookies into your OTHER browser, for use to track you later on. Dirty, dirty stuff.
Program_Install 5y ago
Not sure why people are surprised by this anymore. Google is SkyNet, then again most people don’t care. They use the catchphrase, “I got nothing to hide.”, which misses the point entirely.
m-p-3 5y ago
I always assume that if Google can read it, it will record it.
Goety 5y ago
- why dont you buy everything with a credit card? they pay you! - Oh, I dont know. Maybe i think my data is worth more than what they give you in kickbacks.
nathias 5y ago
Anything I buy? I thought it was just everything ...
amai 5y ago
Is this legal in the EU?
reportgunner 5y ago
It would be silly to assume they don't.

743 points by decrypt 5y ago

Wow. It's not even just everything you buy from Google--from the post it seems like they actively compile and organize the data from every purchaser transaction that touches your GMail account. I think we deserve to hear from Google about this one. Unless we have already?

nemasu 5y ago
I wonder if it's to get that fancy header at the top of purchase emails.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  They wouldn't have to store the data after the email was deleted if that was the only reason.
kreeben 5y ago
"We're organizing the world's information and making it searchable [so that we can show you ads]."
- prepend 5y ago
  “And dynamically price things based on your income and calculated demand”
tablespoon 5y ago
> Wow. It's not even just everything you buy from Google--from the post it seems like they actively compile and organize the data from every purchaser transaction that touches your GMail account. IIRC, that's why Amazon purchase emails are utterly useless now. They realized Google was getting their precious customer data via Gmail, so they cut off the flow years ago. It's another example of how the modern economy has many consumer-hostile incentives that have actually led to regressions rather than improvements.
- standardUser 5y ago
  Huh, I suppose that's why I sometimes have to click through several different Amazon emails to find the specific order or shipment I'm looking for. They've removed the details from the actual email.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > Huh, I suppose that's why I sometimes have to click through several different Amazon emails to find the specific order or shipment I'm looking for. They've removed the details from the actual email. Yeah, and there's nothing you can do. I don't even use gmail anymore, and the emails are still garbage. I think for awhile they used to include a truncated name of one of the products in the order, but it looks like they even removed that (sometime around August 2019, based on my emails). Unrelated observation: in my original comment I added a second paragraph noting that this regression was due to the incentives caused by modern capitalism (and it is: owners trying to extract maximum value for themselves, even if that means hurting their customers), and it immediately started getting downvoted. Then I change "capitalism" to "economy" and it started going up again. Some people are really sensitive. It must be blasphemy to criticize the invisible hand and the wisdom of the owners ti guides. I guess right is whatever they do.
    - space_fountain 5y ago
      Could also be that they just want you back on their site because some ab test at some point decided you're more likely to be buy from them again if they can get you back onto amazon.com
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    It benefits them in many ways. Good luck figuring out where a random Amazon box was ordered from if there are multiple buyers in your household.
  - 5y ago
kelp 5y ago
The first time I heard about Gmail collecting your purchase history, I moved to Fastmail and I've been pretty happy. Downside is Gmail search is a lot better than Fastmail's. But otherwise it's worked great.
- Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
  Gmail Search is getting subpar now than it was before. It didn't show the email that I knew the subject, or the body have that. Sometimes I have added the email address or several names to get it to find the email. Sometimes it works. 5 years ago, it has no problem finding those emails. And now, it is hit and miss. This is on my Google Workplace account.
- hpkuarg 5y ago
  I've been a happy Fastmail user for years as well, but now am looking to switch away due to the Australian surveillance bill.
peakaboo 5y ago
In 2021, I'm surprised people expect Google to give you privacy.
GeekyBear 5y ago
>It's not even just everything you buy from Google--from the post it seems like they actively compile and organize the data from every purchaser transaction that touches your GMail account. Google literally buys a copy of most people's credit card transaction data. >Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases. https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-now-tracks-your-credit-card-purchases-and-connects-them-to-its-online-profile-of-you/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...
samstave 5y ago
Drat!!! Google knows all about my dealings with Nigerian Princes!! I'm ruined!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rtomanek 5y ago

Does this show up in Google Takeout export?

tdeck 5y ago
That's what the article says.
decrypt 5y ago
Yes, from the toot, all of this data is visible on a Google Takeout export.
tillinghast 5y ago
> Here's metadata from my takeout showing … Apparently. Haven't tested myself yet.

aj3 5y ago

Well duh. They have to comply with anti-money laundering regulation.

nemasu 5y ago
This was my first thought too. But it seems like any purchase, even if Google isn't involved, is logged.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Do they? They’re not the ones actually moving the money in this scenario. Generally KYC and AML laws apply to the actual banks or money transmitter, which sometimes is Google if you use their payment services, but not if it’s just their email.
hungryforcodes 5y ago
What does AML have to do with what I buy online?
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Anyone who transmits your money, including CC companies, have to comply with KYC and AML laws. I believe this might include Google Pay, but I don’t see how this would include Gmail for cases where you didn’t use Google Pay.
  - hungryforcodes 5y ago
    Where? You mean in America? It's really not needed where I am. Also rather doubt I need to pass KYC to buy a burger and fries from a food delivery service in the US.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      I’m only familiar with American laws, but KYC and AML laws are not a uniquely American thing. The EU has similar directives, although I'm sure the implementations differ. And yes, if you bought burgers and fries in the US you actually did pass KYC/AML laws, you are just completely unaware of it. The KYC (know your customer) laws applied when you created your financial account, your bank is obligated to check your identity before creating an account, and the AML laws are about monitoring financial transactions for something fishy. Here in the US, you need a paper trail for deposits greater than $10k, and banks are on the lookout for “structured” deposits that side step this requirement. So buying a burger occasionally is fine, but if you started buying $15k worth of burgers a month, you’ll start tripping financial systems wondering if you’re doing something illegal. As a practical matter, this is one reason why people joke about cash only businesses being a front. A cash only laundromat or restaurant is a fantastic way to clean dirty money for use in the us market.

clscott 5y ago

Worse, the stores are feeding them this info in easy to digest packets: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference

c16 5y ago

If you don't pay for the product then YOU are the product.

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago

Very unlikely that they keep the record indefinitely after you delete the email. Instead, it's likely that the systems that store the derived information are not transactionally connected to the email database. Deletions would be reflected eventually, but only according to the periodicity with which the two systems are synchronized.

junon 5y ago
And what makes you think this is the case? Or is it speculation?
- saalweachter 5y ago
  https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention?hl=en-US https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention?hl=en-US > When you delete data in your Google account, we immediately start the process of removing it from the product and our systems. First, we aim to immediately remove it from view and the data may no longer be used to personalize your Google experience. For example, if you delete a video you watched from your My Activity dashboard, YouTube will immediately stop showing your watch progress for that video. > We then begin a process designed to safely and completely delete the data from our storage systems. Safe deletion is important to protect our users and customers from accidental data loss. Complete deletion of data from our servers is equally important for users’ peace of mind. This process generally takes around 2 months from the time of deletion. This often includes up to a month-long recovery period in case the data was removed unintentionally. > Each Google storage system from which data gets deleted has its own detailed process for safe and complete deletion. This might involve repeated passes through the system to confirm all data has been deleted, or brief delays to allow for recovery from mistakes. As a result, deletion could sometimes take longer when extra time is needed to safely and completely delete the data. > Our services also use encrypted backup storage as another layer of protection to help recover from potential disasters. Data can remain on these systems for up to 6 months.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    This does not say what you are implying above - this talks about a formal data deletion request, not just deleting the email.

sneak 5y ago

Of course they do. Gmail's logs of essentially your entire economic activity (travel, flights, driving directions, online orders, food delivery, etc), tied to your identity, is the most valuable thing Google has as an advertiser. (They even buy purchase logs from retailers, tied to phone numbers; recall that you can't get a Google Account without a phone number.) This is why Amazon started somewhat redacting the transactional emails they send out when you buy stuff. Only a fool would use Gmail.

hamburglar 5y ago

Why on earth would anyone think deleting an email would make google remove the info they've gathered on you?

stavros 5y ago

If you own your email domain, it takes all of fifteen minutes to move to something like Fastmail. You just switch the MX records, run a GMail import, and you're done. Plus, Fastmail's UI is much faster than GMail's.

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
Yeah, and GMail might lose a few hundred users!
- stavros 5y ago
  If you don't own your domain, email is probably not very important to you, so just set up an autoresponder to tell people to update to your new address and forward the mail to your new provider.
  - jiveturkey 5y ago
    > If you don't own your domain, email is probably not very important to you, Or, you're part of the 95-99% for whom email and the Internet is of critical importance but because of the ease of access, and the technical minutiae, and generally misplaced trust in corporations, you never learn why this might matter. Sorry to say it, but I find your comment condescending.
decrypt 5y ago
Very much this. I am a happy Migadu user today. Works on any IMAP-compatible app. I have a domain for myself, and one for my parents. I want to move my extended family to a custom domain. It's even possible for them to create a new Google account with that custom domain for all Google things besides Gmail, yet I imagine a lot of push back to this idea.
tW4r 5y ago
Additionally, if you’re in the Apple ecosystem, they introduced custom email domains for iCloud this month with iOS 15 with their cheapest iCloud+ plan for 0.99
5y ago

Rompect 5y ago

Water is wet

goohle 5y ago
Sky is blue.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

function_seven 5y ago

Amazon's order status emails ("Shipped", "Out for Delivery", etc.) used to show the items in the order and how much I paid for them. They stopped doing that[0] last year presumably because of evil behavior like this. [0] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/06/01/unhelpful-amazon-order-confirmation-e-mails/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/06/01/unhelpful-amazon-order-co...

minsc__and__boo 5y ago
I can almost guarantee Amazon dropped the item details from their emails in order to get you to click back into the store.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  yea i like this take better. facebook used to include message or comment content in notification emails. it was nice to get updates without having to log on to their horrible GUI. but of course they cant make ad impressions if i never log on… their emails no longer contain content of comments.
- homerunnerhome 5y ago
  I work for another retail where we discussed this same topic, and during that discussion I talked to some of my friends at Amazon and I would bet a lot of money that your guarantee is wrong. From what they told me, the decision to remove info from the emails was a company-wide campaign that was specifically created as a result of this [0] NYTimes article, which specifically calls out Google snooping on Amazon shopper data. I'm sure the advertising PMs were happy to support this decision because it got them more page clicks, but my understanding is that the underlying motive was privacy. 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/opinion/google-purchases.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/opinion/google-purchases....
  - bagacrap 5y ago
    privacy, or moat building? I don't consider it a breach of privacy for Gmail to index my purchases in order to show me more relevant ads and help provide a free service. And I definitely want to be able to search that index myself, like if I know I bought a product but can't remember from who or when it was, it sure would be nice to be able to search my Gmail for it.

kobieyc 5y ago

This is an example of why I moved off Gmail to ProtonMail

lizknope 5y ago

I remember when Google Mail launched on April Fool's Day in 2004. I thought the 1GB of storage for email was a prank because it was a huge amount to offer for free. I made an account just to try it out but then I saw all the advertisements it added. Seeing ads based on the content of my email was really creepy. I stopped using Gmail and now I pay Fastmail for my email. It seems worth it to me.

gsich 5y ago

Of course, there is/was a feature that showed you your recent transactions, delivery notices.

decrypt 5y ago

From the same tooter: >If you use #Google Photos, there's a non-zero chance that there are secret, yet public URLs attached to your photos that allow un-authenticated access to every picture in your account. Mine did, and I tested the addresses in incognito and tor browsers and they worked. #privacy https://mastodon.social/@gerowen/106978306449754832 https://mastodon.social/@gerowen/106978306449754832

judge2020 5y ago
"unauthenticated access" is a stretch. It's like how rawgithubcontent links originating from GitHub.com on private repos contain a query parameter ?token= that is an API token for accessing that repo "without authentication" - it's in the URL, sure, but that URL itself contains a long, random series of characters that is needed to access the content.
jeffbee 5y ago
"Secret yet public" is a new achievement in privacy derangement. The URL is secret. It is public if you share it, after which it is not secret.
- prepend 5y ago
  It’s also really hard to audit, so if Google shares it and people access it, Google won’t know. This is not cool for me because I don’t want my photos available to people other than me, even if they have my magic url with a token I didn’t create and can’t revoke.
  - kyle-rb 5y ago
    How is a magic url really any different from a magic login cookie in this case? Yeah, I guess you can't revoke it, but what's the difference if the new cookie/url is equally unguessable?
    - prepend 5y ago
      I create and revoke tokens, that’s a big difference. With magic urls, I don’t know they exist so I can’t share or control them.

stephc_int13 5y ago

This is why I stopped using Gmail years ago. It combines bad user experience with giving them too much power. Google is really not our friend.

pat-jay 5y ago

Is it overstated to say "this is creepy AF"?

pantulis 5y ago

Is Google Takeout only limited to GMail? I am pretty sure this transaction data can also be gathered via Analytics, so I guess there would be no foul play on the part of GMail. But of course, you are logged into your Google Profile because you use GMail.

Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
It is not limited to that, it encompassed everything under Google umbrella like Gmail, Search, Health, etc. They have multiple options that you can tick the data you want to obtain. To be warn, the folder itself can be absurdly large depending how entrenched you are in Google ecosystem. Last time I checked mine, it is over 50 GB.

rc_mob 5y ago

so you are saying we should , send ourselves some fake purchase receipts just to fuck with googles data?

tomrod 5y ago
Exactly this. Monkeywrench_Tech_as_a_Service.

barneygale 5y ago

Working for Google is outright unethical.

jsnell 5y ago

Isn't this controlled by the "Gmail smart features" setting, which they explicitly had a modal dialog for last year, to make everyone explicitly decide to enable or disable? https://blog.google/products/gmail/new-settings-smart-features-and-personalization-gmail/ https://blog.google/products/gmail/new-settings-smart-featur... Seems a bit odd for the poster to enable it, and then complain. The text seems fairly clear. Oh, wait... The screenshot shows the Takeout as being from 2019. Why post about it now?

morsch 5y ago
I assume they did that because they had to (GDPR, the blog post is tagged as Google in Europe, even if they did it worldwide). I think I opted in. In typical Google fashion, you had either the choice to enable everything or nothing. I want the tabbed inbox, I don't want smart compose, or assistant integration or... anything else from that post, really. They also lock all kinds of basic features of Google Maps (like manually set and store my home address) behind the permission to record, store and processes indefinitely my location history.
throwdecro 5y ago
> Isn't this controlled by the "Gmail smart features" setting... I just went through the Google's "Privacy Checkup" and it wasn't clear to me where this setting is. Also is the Takeout from 2019, or are there purchases from 2019 in a current Takeout? What specifically are you looking at in the screenshot?
- jsnell 5y ago
  The name of the directory, shown in the top right, is google-takeout-20190313*. That's the time when the Takeout was exported.

osigurdson 5y ago

Google should offer a paid gmail service with a detailed privacy contract. Presumably they are not spying on businesses that pay for G Suite. Perhaps this already exists.

paxys 5y ago
You are describing Google Workspace
- osigurdson 5y ago
  Isn't that just the new name for G Suite? What I am describing is a very simple workflow like the following: 1. Log in to gmail 2. Navigate to account settings 3. Select an "enhanced privacy" option 4. Enter a credit card number The user now owns all of their own content - no sharing without the user's permission.
jeffbee 5y ago
Google has been offering that for years. It attracts the opposite complaint: a lot of the features you get with a gmail.com account don't work with the fancier accounts.

kyrra 5y ago

Googler, opinions are my own. Google has been doing this for a while, as can be seen when the reporters wrote about it 2 years ago: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18629789/google-purchase-history-gmail-email-receipts https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18629789/google-purchase-.... HN discussed it at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19942219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19942219 You can see the information it has already collected if you use Google, by visiting: https://myaccount.google.com/purchases https://myaccount.google.com/purchases Though oddly my list is empty. I wonder if I disabled this feature at some point? The help docs: https://support.google.com/accounts?p=orders&hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts?p=orders&hl=en, explain how you can delete this data if you want to.

Eighth 5y ago
I think it's more talking about gmail purchase records, which can be viewed here: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/category%3Apurchases https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/category%3Apurchase...
- potatoman22 5y ago
  It's pretty deceptive that they don't disclose these are categorized and stored for advertising purposes. That's unethical IMO.
  - eth0up 5y ago
    On the About Gmail page, in large bold text is stated: "We never use your Gmail content for any ads purposes" emphasis mine. That might qualify as deceptive.
    - jsnell 5y ago
      Why do you think that this is being used for advertising purposes? Because HN user potatoman22 asserted that with no evidence?

jeffbee 5y ago

So forgive me for just being a slave to the downvotes, but this is the daily reminder to think critically. What I'd like to know from this user to clarify what's happening here is whether they are a Google Pay user, and if they have "Show bills & receipts from Gmail" enabled in Google Pay. It defaults to off, for what it's worth, but if you enable the feature it might have the effect of pinning this data even if the source emails are deleted.

dreyfan 5y ago

Edison [1] (who was acquired [2] today by a company that sells your data to hedge funds) does precisely this too, except they sell all your data to third parties. Google at least keeps it in-house I guess? Privacy is such an illusion. [1] https://mail.edison.tech/ https://mail.edison.tech/ [2] https://www.edison.tech/blog/edison-acquired-by-yipit https://www.edison.tech/blog/edison-acquired-by-yipit

Eighth 5y ago
'sell all your data to third parties' is an interesting claim for Edison as their marketing is very privacy conscious. Do you have sources for it? edit: ignore, I just read their privacy policy. God damn it. Can't trust anyone.
- dreyfan 5y ago
  They've been doing it for years yeah. A decent source is https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkekmb/free-email-apps-spying-on-you-edison-slice-cleanfox https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkekmb/free-email-apps-spyin...
- LudvigVanHassen 5y ago
  The edit is the correct response. Technology is awesome, but it's fallen into the hands of a bunch of god damn authoritarians. Trust absolutely no one. Paranoid should be your default behavior towards any files you have a device that accesses the Internet. There's 10,000 tentacles seeking that data.
rapnie 5y ago
There was a Tegenlicht [0] documentary on Dutch TV some weeks ago, on how pervasive data collection is 'revolutionising' how the stock exchanges and entire financial world operates. This data really is the new oil, and its analysis gives a headstart, advanced prior knowledge for traders that have early access. [0] https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/2021-2022/handel-in-voorkennis.html https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/... Translated from Dutch: "The stock market should be a level playing field: everyone has the same information. But unnoticed, terabytes of data have entered the stock market. Smart companies dive into the mountain of data that is collected about us, in order to be able to see Apple's sales or the number of Netflix subscribers before the rest of the market does. VPRO Tegenlicht delves into the world of 'alternative data' to see who will win on the stock market, and who will not." Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Demoneeri 5y ago

I'd expect nothing less, if I ask Google assistant about my last purchases, I expect it's going to show me the data. It's bad enough that Amazon doesn't include what you are purchasing in the email and that you have to open the site to see...

darthvoldemort 5y ago

I wish I could pay $20/month for Gmail without the spying and data collection, actual customer support, with a guarantee that my account wouldn't get locked because of one of their fucking mistakes.

rubyist5eva 5y ago
fastmail is a fantastic email service, and much cheaper than that.
- lom 5y ago
  It’s not only about gmail. The google suite is unbeatable in terms of functionality and UX.
  - rubyist5eva 5y ago
    GP said Gmail not GSuite. Also GSuite for a single user is also much cheaper than what he is asking for.
  - rubyist5eva 5y ago
    also, I personally find Google's design language atrocious
reilly3000 5y ago
I pay $11 / mo and have all of those things. GSuite/Workplace doesn’t run any ads or extraneous tracking, their corporate customers would never allow it.
- afandian 5y ago
  I used to, before leaving for fastmail. But it's a joke to suggest that you get any meaningful support for your money. And I don't think that my account would get better treatment than a free one if they decided to delete it for some reason.

mysterydip 5y ago

Could fake/phishing emails be used to poison your profile? "Thanks for your constipation medication order"

reacharavindh 5y ago

Good thing they keep track of all the spam I get! The membership to something long forgotten, marketing emails from US shops(I don’t live in US anymore) and some developer mailing lists from that one time I had to write to get support. If they are so evil and clever, I at least make them work through a lot of bull shit before they profile me. My emails are at Fastmail as a paid user. Hopefully they are away from advertising companies. But, any Gmail user I have emailed would leak that info to Google.

passivate 5y ago
They do a good job of blocking email adverts/spam, but it also competes with their own paid service which shows the user adverts/spam. Okay, maybe I am a bit cynical :)

leephillips 5y ago

Google reads your Gmail. They admit it. They've never hidden it, as far as I know. If you choose to use Gmail, you've chosen to let Google's computers read, analyse, and store information about the contents of your email.

jvolkman 5y ago
All email providers that want customers analyze and store information about the content of emails so they can provide features such as spam filtering and search.
- leephillips 5y ago
  Another reason for me to be glad that I don’t use an email provider. But is this true? Does Protonmail do this?
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    It appears so: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/spam-filtering/ https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/spam-filtering... (I work on Gmail, but that shouldn't really be relevant here)
    - leephillips 5y ago
      The link, and the custom filter page that it links to, only talk about filtering by sender address and subject line, not by email content. (Although the Subject header is part of the email body.)
passivate 5y ago
>If you choose to use Gmail, Google also does that if I don't use Gmail but send email to someone with a Gmail account, or send email to an address that forwards to a gmail account, etc.
- 5y ago

reacharavindh 5y ago

I wish there was an online service that would let users poison their own data. Like allowing me to intentionally get emails about random stuff, shopping receipts etc from absurd entities just to throw the profilers off our scent. Would be fun. Same with something I can run Google Maps with my account logged in so that Google thinks I am one heck of a super traveler, and shopper of things. Something that watches random YouTube videos for me, and randomly clicks on ads for me.. :-) Uploads random photos into a Google Photos account for me :-) That’s be heck of a lot fun!

decrypt 5y ago
For search, I use TrackMeNot, a browser extension that makes random searches every few seconds: https://trackmenot.io/ https://trackmenot.io/
- shultays 5y ago
  Semi related xkcd: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/packages.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/packages.png
- dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
  This is very cool but I wonder how effective it is. I suspect Google can trivially discard the activity it generates?
drdeadringer 5y ago
What I'm hearing is that it's gotten so bad that people are now wanting email spam in order to combat data tracking, if not wanting email spam to combat email spam.
- samstave 5y ago
  Has anyone else all of a sudden been getting a lot of actual spam delivered to their Gmail Inbox in the last ~3 weeks. I have been getting a lot. (a couple a week, which is a lot compared to zero for N years.) ((I was a customer of Postini before google bought them and integrated them into gmail as, IIRC, their spam system...))

yawaworht1978 5y ago

I have always wondered if google can see the YouTube, Gmail passwords, not from the database,but you can see your own passwords in the browser in plain text and since all the apps are theirs, a keylogger would be impossible to detect. Another thing is, do they have a back up of data from the Myaccount. Subdomain that users delete. Still I trust google and amazon more than Microsoft and apple and Facebook. Just me personal view, I could be totally wrong. The ones I trust are simply more open about data storage and have less dark patterns and clandestine TCS. But yes, wide spread Gmail usage will make google see many things and they will collect a lot of data. Probably even more delicate data than what Facebook gets to see.

kreeben 5y ago

User X: buys dildo Google: X likes dildos Dildo Salesperson: Google, who likes dildos? Google: X User X: deletes dildo receipt email Salesperson: Is X still into dildos? Google: Yeah, they just don't like receipts.

JohnFen 5y ago

This sort of nonsense is primarily why I avoid using Google products.

reilly3000 5y ago

I assume this is so they can stop retargeting you for stuff you’ve already purchased. Maybe also for general conversion tracking and market insights.

packeted 5y ago

Are google workspace accounts treated the same? I have several fill me domains hosted with Google duo curious if this behavior tracks over to their paid products

ipaddr 5y ago

Am I the only person who would never think to give google,facebook, twitter my credit card? Or would never pay them any money regardless? After linking your credit history the targeting and linking of information that would follow would be a privacy blackhole that would be hard to recover from.

afandian 5y ago

Not if you leave Google. You can do it.

deleted 5y ago

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heywherelogingo 5y ago

I love how people are surprised/shocked by this. It's perfectly in line with Google's character, yet every time another example of that character is highlighted people are still surprised. Perpetual surprise. Oh, this fire burnt my finger... oh, that fire burnt my finger... oh, yet another fire that burnt my finger... At what point do realise you're not going to find a cold fire?

zokier 5y ago

I'm kinda confused which part of this is news? That Google extracts purchase information from mails? That's a feature that's been even exposed in UI for ages! Or that Google uses incoming mail to enrich user profiles? I would have thought that to be obvious? If you put 1+1 together, then it seems pretty unsurprising that they have purchase histories of users. Maybe I'm just too jaded at this point

deleted 5y ago
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ggalaxximm 5y ago

Who here is buying things with or through Google? Who actually has ever used "Google Pay"? Hell, I make it my religious duty to keep my GMAIL account under 15GB at all times, so I never, ever, ever have to reveal any of my banking information to Google. I would expect nothing less of Hacker News veterans.

aidenn0 5y ago
My understanding is if you have a receipt sent to your gmail account, google scrapes and tracks those purchases.

antattack 5y ago

I am pretty sure Microsoft is doing the same.

bengale 5y ago

Isn’t this largely the point of gmail? It’s a data collection tool isn’t it?

rastafang 5y ago

I wish stores and every other websites that require registration would stop requiring an email address in the process.

shapefrog 5y ago

Google knows fuck all compared to what Amex has on me.

kreeben 5y ago
Excellent rebuttal. I mean, who gives a fuck what Google does, when we 'av Amex's despicable conducture to worry 'bout, ey mate?
- deleted 5y ago
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- shapefrog 5y ago
  Given the evil google data is the tiniest of tiny subsets of the 'everything you buy' data. Then yeah - not to mention the banks, ecommerce platforms, payment providers and card companies selling the data on to the highest bidder.

qualudeheart 5y ago

One of these days some simple soul is going to pick up purchase data for the rich and powerful and read it. Then the rich and powerful will be embarassed.

jrochkind1 5y ago

I don't understand what I'm looking at. What is this showing?

fuzzieozzie 5y ago

.. and this is why I have different email addresses for shopping.

kin 5y ago

Great, then it should stop advertising to me what it knows I just bought.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

It looks bad, but they need this info to optimize the spam filter

fn-mote 5y ago

I for one am very grateful to see Googlers coming out to post on this thread. PM of GMail?! Thank you. Replies here show a lot of animosity and distrust... not saying I disagree in general, but on this particular point the response from multiple levels has been unequivocal that "this is not happening", and I believe it.

floatingatoll 5y ago

This data capture alone was the sole factor that drove me to conclusively exit Gmail. There were many reasons I might have over the years, but this is what solidified feelings into actions for me.

lostmsu 5y ago

Why don't companies like Amazon who care about customer privacy have a field in the account settings, where you could post a public key of some kind (e.g. PGP or S/MIME), so that all email they send you would be encrypted?

entropicgravity 5y ago

Mine showed up nothing even though I buy things every now and then. Google offered to "search for other purchases in Gmail" but I declined. I would be interested to know what Google does do with information in my email account other than the email service.

oort-cloud9 5y ago

So what? Does not bother me what they know about my purchases.

olliej 5y ago

Google's harvesting of email data is why amazon, etc no longer include what you bought in emails that they send you.

kkodaxeroo 5y ago

I remember when you uninstalled Chrome, it opened your other default browser to display a webpage with the message "You have uninstalled Chrome. We're sorry to see you go!" That entire maneuver was just to plant tracking cookies into your OTHER browser, for use to track you later on. Dirty, dirty stuff.

Program_Install 5y ago

Not sure why people are surprised by this anymore. Google is SkyNet, then again most people don’t care. They use the catchphrase, “I got nothing to hide.”, which misses the point entirely.

m-p-3 5y ago

I always assume that if Google can read it, it will record it.

Goety 5y ago

- why dont you buy everything with a credit card? they pay you! - Oh, I dont know. Maybe i think my data is worth more than what they give you in kickbacks.

nathias 5y ago

Anything I buy? I thought it was just everything ...

amai 5y ago

Is this legal in the EU?

reportgunner 5y ago

It would be silly to assume they don't.