See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations • Hacker News Board

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#111

Post by beaner » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:22 AM UTC

olliej wrote: post #93

beaner wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this comment is a great example of why I think most of the privacy concerns, especially around Google these days, are mostly overblown. I am not afraid of that example happening because that is not how Google operates. Google makes money by connecting ads to search queries. An advertiser makes an ad, says "make it appear for the term 'xbox'", and it shows up on Google for searches of Xbox. The advertiser has…

No. Google makes money off connecting ads to profiles. The vast majority of ads you see are not on search result pages. They’re on arbitrary non-google related pages, so to make that work google has basically moved to a “track everything this person does online so we can build and sell a profile of them”. Your argument about data privacy is a nonsense - what matters is data security - Their business depends on them b…

I don't know that your post argues anything meaningful to me.

Connecting ads to profiles over ads to search - okay. That doesn't seem super different. The point is the advertiser doesn't know who I am. That's mostly what I care about.

If google couldn't read my email, they couldn't give me features like when my flight is departing. That's a feature I appreciate.

The point I was trying to make is that people seem to believe that Google reveals your identity and personal details to advertisers for profit, which is false.

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#112

Post by binjo » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 1:42 PM UTC

I really thought this was obvious by now. If the data wasn't being scraped and analysed somewhere how would the categorisation of 'Purchases' work as well as all those payment reminders?

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#113

Post by cannonedhamster » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:01 PM UTC

triodan wrote: post #33

I 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.

Join Google for Work and it disables most of this. You'll still get things like location data and time to leave, but email features such as Inbox, etc were not scanned at all while I was using them.

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#114

Post by tern » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:16 PM UTC

partiallypro wrote: post #87

tern wrote: post #37

> You don't have any purchases Any idea why I might not see any purchases here?

If you're using GSuite, it doesn't display purchases.

That's it, thanks!

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#115

Post by smallnamespace » Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 2:02 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #98

smallnamespace wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To build offline, Google would still need access to (some subset) of data at some point to train the models / write the heuristics.

Sure, but why does it have to be my data? Can't they do it on data they already have, or maybe as their employees to run it (who presumably have much more control over how the data is actually used)?

It's very unlikely that Google employees are going to be representative of Google's users as a whole (just look at the startups building niche products for Bay Area techies). Ditto if you only looked at data of users that opted in (maybe they're highly unrepresentative).

That means the heuristics/models that get built would be a worse fit for you, as a user, although it sounds like that's a tradeoff that you'd like.

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#116

Post by derekp7 » Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 4:39 AM UTC

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…

what would be really cool is if they could add an annotation to an email job offer... something like "This offer appears to be 15% lower than what other candidates have been offered for a similar position".

Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations

#117

Post by tyler_larson » Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 5:19 AM UTC

olliej wrote: post #75

mcny wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can't this be done offline? Where? On every device a user owns?

Yes. A better question would be “why does google itself need this information when it’s just a client side UI feature?”

Gmail's primary UI is a web browser. How... how do you think that _actually_ might work?