Technology companies be it Facebook or Google, have been recently under fire for various reasons, which includes failure to disclose how user data is used and collected, and failure to protect the data from getting leaked or exposed to hackers or 3rd parties.
The company in question today is Search Engine giant, Google, and it has been found that the company is tracking your purchases using Gmail, even if you delete the record.
The story was first cracked by a leading news company, whose correspondent went through his Gmail inbox to delete every single purchase email, one by one, in order to remove the purchases from his Purchases page. However, after 3 weeks, to this surprise, he found that the Purchases page still has a list of all his purchases, going back years, even after he deleted the emails.
Therefore, it means that history related to purchases are not just being pulled from Gmail, but instead cached or stored elsewhere.
It’s true – Via Gmail, Google tracks everything that you purchase
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Earlier in May 2019, Google was similarly found to be tracking the purchase history and pulling all the information of its users from e-mail like confirmation of orders. Both online and physical purchases were found to be tracked, while there was no feature found in settings to put this off.
However, the tech giant at that time claimed that Google Assistant can do activities like tracking packages or reordering items, to help users get things done, and further added that users could simply delete everything by tapping into a purchase and removing the Gmail. However, it only worked if each purchase was deleted individually, which could take hours or even days depending on a person’s purchase history.
However, today, the above explanation of Google seems to have fallen flat as the purchase page of the user still has a list of the purchases even after deleting e-mails. Such incidents show how technology companies often treat your privacy as a zero to low-priority and how vulnerable as users, we are, when it comes to protecting our data.
Time to switch to another email provider? We leave it on you.