Google Gmail purchase history can't be deleted
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
1. gone around deleting every invoice from my GMail inbox
2. Noticed it wasn't getting removed after waiting for 24 hours.
3. Reached out to the reporter mentioning google might be not deleting it properly.
4. Waiting a couple more days and calling off the alarm when google did finally delete it.
I wrote about it at https://captnemo.in/blog/2019/06/01/cleaning-google-purchase.... My purchase history still shows 0 results, more than a month after my cleaning spree.
3 weeks still sounds too long for this information to linger around.
Surprised to this day that many other sites have shut down, but MySpace keeps on kicking.
No backup of user data exists more than 30 days there, typically less.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's the entire, innocent, explanation here.
(I still think you should be able to turn off purchase history separately...)
Or did they fix it for European users?
Edit: Why am I being downvoted for asking this question?
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
GDPR. It requires that the person whose personal data is processed must give explicit permission about what data is processed and allow the purpose for which the data is processed. And it must be possible at any time to withdraw that permission and to delete the data.
At least as far as I understand those rules, ianal.
> and allow the purpose for which the data is processed.
> And it must be possible at any time to withdraw that permission
> and to delete the data.
No it doesn't.
There are several lawful bases for storing and processing data. User permission is only one of those bases. It's usually not the best one to use. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/gdpr-resources/lawful-b...
There’s purchases I’ve deleted emails (and emptied the trash for) only for it to still be in the purchase list. Clicking on the purchase does not lead to the email.
Similarly, I believe the gmail search cache also has some lingering cache issues. There are emails referenced in the drop down in search that I’ve long deleted.
It is frustrating
Instead, the small PII we had was used for fraud signals and for logging/debugging. Very frequently we would get complaints about things not working and we would have to go digging through logs to figure out exactly what happened, and without that data it was hard to figure out exactly what happened if something went wrong.
Most of the data was TTLed in our logs between 7 to 90 days so that took care of most of the issues. Other data that got logged into a data warehouse needs to be deleted via Spark jobs, which takes several days to scour all the data.
Like I said, the companies I've worked at don't need user data for its primary product and even then it took time to fully delete a user's data upon request, so I can imagine it taking a lot of time for a company like Google where extensive use of user's data is widespread throughout the company.
They do not compete on Privacy at all in my opinion. So then the choice comes down to price, features and economic viability of the organisation. I think price and features they are on par with Office 365, well at least for individuals not for enterprises.
But in terms economic longevity I think Microsoft wins hands down. Fastmail might be days away from bankruptcy, none of us would know as it is private company. I would rather have my personal email, that is the glue to modern life, with a Trillion dollar company than with a relatively new minnow.
They have a free tier that they run as a "charity case". As with anything where your data _isn't_ the price, they have paid tiers too.
A first step to the answer to that question would probably be to compare all the terms and contracts.
If you really really want your privacy you're better off running your own. But then a lot of your contacts probably use a provider you didn't trust hosting your email, so there goes a large chunk of that privacy again...
You need to delete your mail in less than 30 days, and store content you want to preserve in your home.
Nobody said that you need to run a mail server, just keep your data in your possession.
If you are worried about privacy with respect to your data, you only have limited protection for 180 days if it is on the providers server. (See Stored Communications Act)
In the US, the 4th amendment ensures that you are “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects”. But when you put your papers or effects in the hands of a third party who isn’t your attorney, you lose much of those rights.
GMail IMO is the most honest of these services, as they are very clear that your privacy is limited in scope. Fastmail, Protonmail, etc imply things that are not as meaningful as one may think.
A 3rd-party will never be as private as running your own mail server but that's not exactly easy either these days.
I actually would like to turn it on if I could... I have labels and filters set up on Gmail to try and do the same thing but having google do it for me would be great.
As a reseller of GSuite I can tell you this is plainly wrong. Support is virtually nonexistent for paid GSuite (by this I mean, it's the same outsourced team with no escalation path to anyone in engineering). Avoid at all costs for a business.
The reality is every provider is both good and bad, and you're unlikely to get any major support unless you're the CTO of a major corporation.
The small engineering team of 5 people can't properly deal with more than say 1 support request per day (since any request getting to that level is almost certain to require adding/modifying a feature or the way the product works).
Gmail has 1 billion users. That means fewer than 1 in 3 million people can have a support request that gets through to the engineering team without overwhelming them.
Super easy to remove from the blocklists.
I am not entirely sure what you mean by delivery?
i’m pretty sure that’s not what you meant, so you need to clarify your question.
Outlook.com (free public service) does not scan emails for ads - I filed a support ticket for asking about this year's ago.
Additionally, if you pay for O365 (Home or Personal, maybe just Home?) and use the same Microsoft account for email (via Outlook.com) then no ads are displayed at all.
>It also says you can delete this log by deleting the email, but three weeks after we deleted all email, the list is still there.
Is there any company that deletes their customers' purchase histories?
And doesn't the IRS prescribe that this kind of information should be in the books?
And yours isn't the first comment in this thread who's question can be answered if they bothered reading the article. Some are quick to defend the actions of a corporation.
not anymore. amazon has stopped putting product information in notification emails for just this reason. Notifications are now generic, “your order confirmation” etc. you have to login to amazon to discover the order that was confirmed etc. makes email receipts much less useful but avoids the 3rd party privacy issue.
and also, TFA is wrong. if you delete the email AND empty the trash, or wait 30 days for auto-empty, the purchase is forgotten by gmail.
even with this in mind, amazon chose to remove specifics from their notifications.
EDIT: except for the first 1click notification.
> When I click on an individual purchase and try to remove it — it says I can do this by deleting the email, after all — it just redirects to my inbox and not to the original email message for me to delete, since that email no longer exists.