As highlighted in an article by CNBC News, Google is collecting a lot of personal information from its commonly used services, such as Gmail, and some of it can’t be easily deleted. The company is also found to have been saving years of information on purchases made by users, even outside Google, and it pulls this information from Gmail.
Although Google says it does not use any information from a user’s Gmail account to serve relevant ads, there isn’t an easy way to remove the information it has saved already. This includes the email receipts and confirmations shown on a user’s ‘Purchase’ page, which can be accessed by visiting http://myaccount.google.com/purchases.
According to a Google spokesperson, the Purchase page has been designed “to help you easily view and keep track of your purchases, bookings, and subscriptions in one place.”:
Google’s privacy page says that only you can view your purchases. But it says “Information about your orders may also be saved with your activity in other Google services ” and that you can see and delete this information on a separate “My Activity” page.
Except you can’t. Google’s activity controls page doesn’t give you any ability to manage the data it stores on Purchases.
Google also told CNBC that you can turn off the tracking entirely, but you have to go to another page for search setting preferences. However, when CNBC tried this, it didn’t work.
Turns out, there is no such option to fully turn off your purchase tracking by Google.
