This is not a new thing: their Inbox app automatically picks up my amazon purchases and tracks its progress. The items show up with a picture of the item inline as well, which I thought was a rather nice touch. It also picked up emails from Eat24/Yelp and showed them with the restaurant's own photo of the item I ordered, which is rather astonishing. Nice job, whoever implemented that
It does this for Ebay and flights too. I quite like the Google Now updates from this. That said the Now service seems to be stagnating. I've not seen any improvements for a long time. I quite like my early experience with Cortana on a new MS phone. Looking forward to the software wars on developing better PA devices.
They just added the ability to hold down on words in any android app and get information on the word. For example if you press and hold "chinese food" it will pop up with yelp reviews of nearby places. This is not available on all flavors of android IIRC.
It also scraps my hotel bookings, automatically add it to my calender if it was booked under my name and when I tried to look up the address on google maps a mark has already been added. Quite nifty if you ask me.
I know everyone freaks out these days about Google data collecting, but I find Google Now to be incredibly useful.
Getting android notifications of my flights with the gate and boarding times scrapped from my email is super nice.
It's not clear from the sketchy evidence provided that they're specifically scraping GMail for your Amazon purchases. It might be that they're looking into your GMail for search results in general. It would be interesting if that user sent himself a message with the same search terms in it to see whether the results are specific to emails from Amazon.
No, they directly scrape. I've noticed this feature for over a year in Google Now. They include the delivery time and status.
Google is now telling you that they have scraped your email for purchases.