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See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

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Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#41

Post by RL_Quine »

TrickyRick wrote: post #34
kenhwang wrote: post #3

It'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

There's something to be said about intent there. The distinction between "we are a dumb store for images" and "we process all of your images, extract facial recognition data, and match them to landmarks" is stark, but usually undefined. In general I'd argue that "you agreed to this" in regards to a TOS is utter nonsense, as they always contain language and descriptions of a product in such a way that nobody can really understand what's going on. I'd have to spend weeks per year reading the TOS I'd implicitly agreed to, supposedly.

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#42

Post by lettergram »

fitzroy wrote: post #38
iKevinShah wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Now I'm curious to know if they're using this info to analyze competitor marketshare and/or set prices for competing services.

We already know they do... They'll even milk companies for money, bet against them, etc. It's clearly they should have their company broken up IMO (and I'm typically a libertarian)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053819

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#43

Post by halflings »

nomel wrote: post #32
kenhwang wrote: post #3

It'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.

See my post in parent, this is nowhere in the terms of service.

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#44

Post by halflings »

kenhwang wrote: post #3

It'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.

From June 2017: "Google Will No Longer Scan Gmail for Ad Targeting"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#45

Post by macintux »

fitzroy wrote: post #19

I'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…

Fastmail rocks.

And Apple keeps the old domains, so my me.com email works fine. I never use icloud.com.

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#46

Post by ve55 »

beaner wrote: post #21

I kind of like this. It's already in my email, which they host. I don't see why I should not want this feature, where they aggregate helpful information for me.

You can't think up a single reason why you might not want every purchase you've made in your entire life to be logged in a centralized database completely outside of your control and view which will be kept forever and shared with an unknowable amount of unknown powerful entities that do not care about your well-being?

Some people are going to have a very rough time when reality finally strikes them with all of its might. Perhaps it won't be you, but it will happen.

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#47

Post by sujal »

ericd wrote: post #25
jhall1468 wrote: post #11

Earlier 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?

I’d add Fastmail + Mailroute. It’s working well for me, with spam protection that’s just a tiny step below GMails.

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#49

Post by confounded »

jhall1468 wrote: post #11
petilon wrote: post #5

I 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…

You shell out money to your bank, and they still sell your information.

> Why is this so hard to understand for people?

Because an extremely large amount of money is spent on UX and PR conducted by some of our brightest minds, to make it as hard to understand as possible.

Conflating security and privacy to use 2FA to get phone numbers out of people is a great example. HN and tech news sites were/are awash with security experts telling people to protect their personal information by enriching their identifiers for surveillance companies.

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#50

Post by onion2k »

beaner wrote: post #21

I kind of like this. It's already in my email, which they host. I don't see why I should not want this feature, where they aggregate helpful information for me.

If all they're doing is presenting your data in a better way then it's great.

However, it's very likely that they're also selling adverts based on that data, and possibly selling the data itself. Do you really want your health insurance provider to be able to buy a list of restaurant bookings you've made? Or how about the airline you're about to book with knowing what you paid a competitor last time so they don't need to discount their prices for you to buy?

Would you be happy paying more for things because you use Gmail?

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