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Do you think your email on Gmail is private? If that's the case, think about it again because your Gmail messages are analyzed by Google for purchases, which are then displayed in your Google Account.
This week, a user posted on Reddit how he discovered that his Google Account's purchase page contained all purchases made from Amazon and other online stores, even if they were not available. Did not use Google Pay.
When I saw this, I looked at my Google Account Shopping Page, located at https://myaccount.google.com/purchases, and found that it also contained the purchases I had made to online services such as Dominos, Steam, 1-800- Flowers.com, Amazon, Adidas and more. Like the Reddit user, I do not use Google Pay.
The general view was that Gmail was scanning incoming emails for purchase receipts and then extracting that information.
When BleepingComputer contacted Google about this, he confirmed that the information came from Gmail messages. They also indicated that this transaction was intended to help their users to retrieve their data and that they do not use any of the information stored in your emails, including your purchases, to serve you ads.
"To help you visualize and remember your purchases, bookings, and subscriptions in one place, we've created a private destination that you can not see. You can delete this information at any time. We do not use any of the information in your Gmail messages to serve you ads. This includes the confirmation and confirmation emails displayed on the purchase page. We are always working to help people understand and manage their data. "
If they do not use this information to serve you ads, are they using them for something else? Google has not given us a definitive answer to this question.
Deleting the data of purchase is a pain
While Google told us that you can delete this information at any time, they did not specify how painful it was to do so.
Instead of having a single parameter that allows you to control how this data is saved, you have to go into each purchase and click the Remove a Purchase button. This will take you to the original email from which the data was extracted. Once this email is deleted, the purchase will be removed from the Purchases page.
Since my purchases have data going back to 2013 and showing about 300 purchases, it would be very painful to manually delete them. Even worse, another account that I use for most of my purchases contains thousands of orders, which would take forever to clean up.
When I was looking for a way to prevent Google from removing purchases from my Gmail emails, I could not find a setting that would allow me to do that.
CNBC, which also covered this story this week, was also unable to find a setting preventing Gmail from scanning e-mails and extracting purchase information.
G Suite customers seem spared
I use different email accounts depending on the intended purpose and one of these email accounts uses Google's G Suite service.
When I checked the Purchases page of my G Suite account, I noticed that the page was empty, even though it is commonly used to make online purchases. I also asked another person who uses G Suite and she also confirmed that her page was empty.
Although two people are by no means a large sample, this may indicate that this data extraction is not performed for G Suite accounts. I also did not find any settings in the G Suite Admin console that allow me to configure these settings.
We've already asked Google if G Suite was excluded from this data extraction, but we have not received a response yet.
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