When I first read this was I was troubled, and I am certainly a Google critic, but it seems to specifically say this is for your usage only. It's not being used for their ad network or for them to see behavior. It's used in the same manner as tracking packages, etc. If or when they start using this for their own internal usage to see use purchasing behavior, and telling adwords customers what purchase/products were popular so they could convert, that's when I'd have a major problem with this. As it stands now, I don't see it as a major problem.
See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
31–40 of 117 posts
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#32It's probably safe to assume Google reads all your emails and can probably target advertising off it one way or another. We can probably thank GDPR for forcing companies to disclose what they know about you.
No assumption needed, it's right in the terms of use. I'm surprised to see how surprised people are about this. The fact that they scrape email, for targeted ads and features has been known since 2004.
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#33I appreciate knowing this and I don't fault Google for collecting it; I definitely can see the value in this, both for the customer and Google themselves.
I just wish there's the option to erase the items there, or even better disable the collection entirely.
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#34It's probably safe to assume Google reads all your emails and can probably target advertising off it one way or another. We can probably thank GDPR for forcing companies to disclose what they know about you.
And yet, in this case, it's probably enough for Google to disclose that they have your email, since the rest is data gathered from that which you don't really need to disclose under GDPR
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#35I was shocked when I stumbled on this. All of my purchases, have been scraped from my emails, including every line item, where I purchased these items from and so on. If they are scraping this from my emails without my permission, what else are they scraping? What else does Google know about me? If everything in my emails is scraped by Google it is possible that they know more about me than I do about myself. Very sc…
> If they are scraping this from my emails without my permission, what else are they scraping? YOU GAVE THEM YOUR PERMISSION. Maybe, in the future, read the TOS and Privacy Policies rather than just pressing accept and acting offended when they do EXACTLY what they said they'd do. Had you done that, you'd also know exactly who has access to that information and, if you read when they notify you of policy updates, who…
MISTER PROSSER: But Mister Dent the plans have been available in the planning office for the last nine months!
ARTHUR DENT: Yes! I went round to find them yesterday afternoon. You’d hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to pull much attention to them have you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.
MISTER PROSSER: The plans were on display.
ARTHUR DENT: Ah! And how many members of the public are in the habit of casually dropping around the local planning office of an evening?
MISTER PROSSER: Er – ah!
ARTHUR DENT: It’s not exactly a noted social venue is it? And even if you had popped in on the off chance that some raving bureaucrat wanted to knock your house down, the plans weren’t immediately obvious to the eye were they?
MISTER PROSSER: That depends where you were looking.
ARTHUR DENT: I eventually had to go down to the cellar!
MISTER PROSSER: That’s the display department.
ARTHUR DENT: With a torch!
MISTER PROSSER: The lights, had… probably gone.
ARTHUR DENT: So had the stairs!
MISTER PROSSER: Well you found the notice didn’t you?
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#36Am I overreacting by seriously considering starting the process of migrating from gmail? It's not this singular incident of course, but just the continued pattern of behavior from Google for the last couple years. I really have lost all faith in them respecting their users.
What are you reacting to in this case? Gmail has always 'scraped' your email.
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#37> You don't have any purchases
Any idea why I might not see any purchases here?
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#38I've always assumed they do this since they've recognized and surfaced flight and event information for years. I thought about switching my email to iCloud but I'm afraid Apple's going to change the domain yet again. And gmail is hella reliable. Google of old might have done something cool with this info and annotated the purchases with something like "14,391 people bought this for an average of $1.08 less" or "you p…
To counter on the point of "Google of old might have done something cool with this info" This is very, VERY subjective. Even if Google did something like "you pay $7.44 per month more than the average Comcast customer in your area" there will be very similar posts detailing how 'Google reads your monthly payment data'.
Sure, but they're already reading your monthly payment data.
My point was just that Google gets and (probably) analyzes aggregate payment information but the user only gets what they already know. If Google is sucking up all of that data, they could at least give some insights to users too.
Now I'm curious to know if they're using this info to analyze competitor marketshare and/or set prices for competing services.
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#39Known to anyone using Google inbox...
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they are scraping this from my emails without my permission, what else are they scraping? YOU GAVE THEM YOUR PERMISSION. Maybe, in the future, read the TOS and Privacy Policies rather than just pressing accept and acting offended when they do EXACTLY what they said they'd do. Had you done that, you'd also know exactly who has access to that information and, if you read when they notify you of policy updates, who…
What good paid alternatives are there?
There was a whole thread on this recently: