Live data from Hacker News

Google Gmail purchase history can't be deleted

cnbc.com

21–30 of 64 posts

Re: Google Gmail purchase history can't be deleted

#21
post #2

Is Office 365 any better - or am I stuck running my own mail server if I really want privacy?

No data in the hands of a third party custodian is secure.

You need to delete your mail in less than 30 days, and store content you want to preserve in your home.

Re: Google Gmail purchase history can't be deleted

#23
post #2

Is Office 365 any better - or am I stuck running my own mail server if I really want privacy?

You can also pay for GSuite for your own domains for better controls and support levels.

A 3rd-party will never be as private as running your own mail server but that's not exactly easy either these days.

Re: Google Gmail purchase history can't be deleted

#24
post #2

Is Office 365 any better - or am I stuck running my own mail server if I really want privacy?

You can also pay for GSuite for your own domains for better controls and support levels. A 3rd-party will never be as private as running your own mail server but that's not exactly easy either these days.

For the record, I have a paid business GSuite account for our household, and my purchase history was out there as well.

Re: Google Gmail purchase history can't be deleted

#25

The reporter never says they deleted the e-mails from their trash, and the "3 week" time period is less than the 30 days it takes for the trash to automatically empty. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the entire, innocent, explanation here. (I still think you should be able to turn off purchase history separately...)

If it was in the trash, then the link to the email the system provided should probably have still worked instead of redirecting him to the inbox

Re: Google Gmail purchase history can't be deleted

#26
post #6

That sounds pretty illegal over here in Europe. Or did they fix it for European users? Edit: Why am I being downvoted for asking this question?

Sounds vague... What law are you referring to? Why would it be illegal? Is that reasonable in this case?

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Google Gmail purchase history can't be deleted

#27
post #2

Is Office 365 any better - or am I stuck running my own mail server if I really want privacy?

No data in the hands of a third party custodian is secure. You need to delete your mail in less than 30 days, and store content you want to preserve in your home.

That's a little much to say. Because setting up a good secure sever isn't trivial.

Re: Google Gmail purchase history can't be deleted

#28
post #12
post #10

Sounds normal to me. Is there any company that deletes their customers' purchase histories? And doesn't the IRS prescribe that this kind of information should be in the books?

This is not the purchase history of Google product/services, it's anything you buy and use your gmail address. Example, if you use your gmail account for Amazon, your entire purchase history will be stored by Google and you can't delete it. And yours isn't the first comment in this thread who's question can be answered if they bothered reading the article. Some are quick to defend the actions of a corporation.

> Example, if you use your gmail account for Amazon, your entire purchase history will be stored by Google and you can't delete it.

not anymore. amazon has stopped putting product information in notification emails for just this reason. Notifications are now generic, “your order confirmation” etc. you have to login to amazon to discover the order that was confirmed etc. makes email receipts much less useful but avoids the 3rd party privacy issue.

and also, TFA is wrong. if you delete the email AND empty the trash, or wait 30 days for auto-empty, the purchase is forgotten by gmail.

even with this in mind, amazon chose to remove specifics from their notifications.

EDIT: except for the first 1click notification.

Re: Google Gmail purchase history can't be deleted

#29
post #2

Is Office 365 any better - or am I stuck running my own mail server if I really want privacy?

if you “really” want privacy, you must use e2e encryption eg pgp.

i’m pretty sure that’s not what you meant, so you need to clarify your question.

Re: Google Gmail purchase history can't be deleted

#30
I have worked at well known tech companies and I personally dealt with some less-valuable-but-still-PII. We didn't store the PII because we cared about exploiting it or because we wanted to somehow sell this data to outsiders, that's not how we made our money. We took and continue to take the security and privacy of our customers very seriously. We made sure we were GDPR compliant as well.

Instead, the small PII we had was used for fraud signals and for logging/debugging. Very frequently we would get complaints about things not working and we would have to go digging through logs to figure out exactly what happened, and without that data it was hard to figure out exactly what happened if something went wrong.

Most of the data was TTLed in our logs between 7 to 90 days so that took care of most of the issues. Other data that got logged into a data warehouse needs to be deleted via Spark jobs, which takes several days to scour all the data.

Like I said, the companies I've worked at don't need user data for its primary product and even then it took time to fully delete a user's data upon request, so I can imagine it taking a lot of time for a company like Google where extensive use of user's data is widespread throughout the company.

Post reply on HN