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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

If your Amazon receipts go to Gmail, Google collects not just all of that data, but from every other site you've bought stuff from: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-purchase...

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Google stopped mining Gmail two years ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

Any aggregation or segmentation of emails by ML/AI algorithms, as your article talks about, is analogous to having smarter filters in your inbox. It's tech illiteracy to confuse these perception NNs with data mining for business purposes.

Your employer is collecting this data right now, as my link points out. And it's actually gotten better at it in the last few months, as I purged all of my purchases from Gmail that it detected, and then a few weeks later, it found more, as they'd refined their ability to mine more transactional emails.

It is absolutely mining email, and it's extracting purchase data from it, that isn't even used in Gmail or revealed to users in any visible context, it's buried in settings. What Google uses it for? I don't know, as you said, they claimed they stopped using Gmail data for ad targeting purposes two years ago. But they're definitely working on extracting this very valuable and marketable data... for some reason.

Is it possible that Google generically collects user purchase data, including from Gmail, and then whilst not using "Gmail data" for ad targeting, it does use the "purchase data" which has been generically made part of a user's Google profile? That'd be splitting hairs real close, but it'd probably be good enough for the lawyers.

Again, last time you doxxed me on HN I told you my profile on HN, which you looked at, says my opinions are my own and do not reflect any organization.

It's technical illiteracy to confuse parsing and filtering with data mining for ads. Read the article, or don't, this is just a comment.

I recognize the difference, but they're parsing and filtering the most valuable advertising data, and then just... shoving it in settings and doing nothing with it? There's no clear reason why Google is collecting purchase data from Gmail, and actively working on refining the code used for it. If you look at my comment that you originally responded to, I did not say they used it for ad targeting, merely that they collected it, which is true. Even if they do not use it for ad targeting, the only purpose your article states they won't use that data, it's still very valuable research data to collect.

Not only that, but as the articles about purchase data parsing states, you can't even opt out of it or remove items from Google's purchase history information except to delete the emails themselves. Which, for people entrusting their communications to Gmail, is a drastic step. It's surprising to even have a "remove" button, but for it then to tell you, in order to do so, you have to delete your emails.

As an aside, it's not doxxing someone when you post as your real name, and publish your employer publicly under the same name. The "my opinions are my own" line is a release of Google's legal liability for what you say, which is why a lot of employers suggest or require similar statements. However, it's psychologically impossible for your opinions to not be swayed by the employer who pays you and whom you spend a large percentage of your time with, regardless of whether or not you are "representing" them officially or not.

> Is it possible that Google generically collects user purchase data, including from Gmail, and then whilst not using "Gmail data" for ad targeting, it does use the "purchase data" which has been generically made part of a user's Google profile?

Probably not. Not only because I don't think the courts would agree with that division being real. But also because it's absurdly expensive compared to just purchasing the data from CC providers which explicitly retain the right to sell your transaction history.

I have no special knowledge of why they're doing that, but I have suspicions and they're mostly about enabling the exact same sort of stuff I lacked the means to enable at my fintech startup.

This is true for gmail users, which is about half of the email market in the US. Amazon by dollars has over half the ecommerce market, but by any intelligence we have on sales sales they're much closer to 80%.

Even if Google can get some of that data, its still Amazon's data, Google just happens to get some of it.

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