According to a piece of recent news from CNBC, “Google has been quietly keeping track of nearly every single online purchase you’ve ever made, thanks to purchase receipts sent to your personal Gmail account.”
CNBC broke the news on Friday afternoon, according to which Google has been saving the purchase history of the people who have used their Gmail account during their purchase on the various e-commerce websites through the receipt they receive on Gmail. Though the company has included privacy settings that can enable the users to stop the tracking, most of the people have got to know about the purchase history tracking only after the revelation from CNBC.
The way CNBC has said about the mentioned matter, it seems like Google had been hiding the fact that it was saving users’ private information and might be using it somewhere else without letting the users know, but Google has come in front to defend itself.
“To help you easily 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.” Google told The Verge in a statement.
In the past years, the company used such information to personalise ads for its users, but in 2017, Google had decided that it won’t collect and use any of the users’ information from Gmail for displaying personalised ads.
Google did not mention how long this tool has been there to track the purchase history of its users, but many Gmail users have found their purchase history even older than a decade. According to Google, this history is hard to find, and the users can delete the history or disable the tracking. Also, no one else except the users can see their purchase history on the tool.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.