Live data from Hacker News

Google – My Activity

myactivity.google.com

21–30 of 246 posts

Re: Google – My Activity

#26
post #8

Well, the upside is that this is still empty after I disabled everything last time this was posted.

Is https://myaccount.google.com/purchases empty as well for you?

Mine finally is :)

I got a shock when I first saw that link on HN, it motivated me to finally purge my email archives on gmail. The purchases didn't disappear immediately, but they do seem to have finally gone now.

Re: Google – My Activity

#27
post #14

Pulled from the other thread, a way to delete all of your activity. https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity

I don't think you can delete purchases from there.

When I hit the "remove purchase" button, it even says "To remove this purchase, delete the email."

Re: Google – My Activity

#28
post #22

Jesus fucking christ. This is scary. They can build a full profile of me with all this data.

Do you enjoy your free email account, free maps, free YouTube and free search?

Outlook/Proton. OpenStreetMaps. Vimeo/Dailymotion. DuckDuckGo.

All free.

Re: Google – My Activity

#29
post #14

Pulled from the other thread, a way to delete all of your activity. https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity

I don't think you can delete purchases from there. When I hit the "remove purchase" button, it even says "To remove this purchase, delete the email."

I'm not sure I fully understand the objection here. The purchase list is a view over your email. They have the email, and they have the code to construct the purchase from the email. What possible additional security would there be in deleting the derived object if they still have the source material and the means to reconstruct the derived object?

If you don't trust them to handle the derived object according to your desires, then deleting it should not give you any assurances, since they could just rebuild it from the source material and the code they have on hand.

I think what you're really looking for is a mechanism like, "don't use this derived object in ways I find objectionable." I'm not sure exactly what that would look like for you; it would probably be different for every individual. For what it's worth, at least if you believe the news and Google's public statements, it doesn't use the contents of your email for ad targeting.

Re: Google – My Activity

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can delete purchases from there. When I hit the "remove purchase" button, it even says "To remove this purchase, delete the email."

I'm not sure I fully understand the objection here. The purchase list is a view over your email. They have the email, and they have the code to construct the purchase from the email. What possible additional security would there be in deleting the derived object if they still have the source material and the means to reconstruct the derived object? If you don't trust them to handle the derived object according to you…

We should be allowed to keep our past emails without having them build a purchase object of everything we have ever bought.
Post reply on HN