Google tracks every single purchase that you have made online in years if you have the receipts sent to your personal Gmail account.
The purchase records can be accessed through a page called Purchases, which shows a list of products that you have purchased using online services such as Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy, and more.
Years before Google said they would stop collecting data through Gmail for ad targeting purchases, but according to the CNBC report, Google is still collecting much personal information behind the scenes.
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If you have the invoices received through your Gmail account and then it extracts the information to list the products that you have purchased.
When I have checked my account purchases, the above list contains all the purchases that I have made from Swiggy, Flipkart, Amazon, and more.
“To help you quickly view and keep track of your purchases, bookings, and subscriptions in one place, we’ve created a private destination that can only be seen by you. You can delete this information at any time. We don’t use any information from your Gmail messages to serve you ads, and that includes the email receipts and confirmations shown on the Purchase page,” said Google Spokesperson.
However, deleting the data is not simple; there are no options to select and delete all the data at once; you should go deleting one by one.
If you want to remove purchase, then need to open the particular purchase, and there you can “Remove Purchase” option, click on that shows a popup with option view Email, which takes you to the Email containing the receipt.
You need to delete the Email and then to remove the Email trash, to get the purchase removed from the list.
To check further, we placed an order in Swiggy, once the payment completed, Swiggy sends a receipt for order confirmation, once the Email received in Inbox, we can the order appears in the purchase list with status Accepted.
Once the order got delivered, a delivery confirmation email arrived from Swiggy, after that the status in the payment page changed from Accepted to completed. The service instantly reads the Email receipt and update the status.
It is still unclear why Google is pulling all the information and dumping them to purchases; the page doesn’t know by most of the people, “Google says it’s looking into simplifying its settings to make them easier to control.”
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