<https://www.fastcompany.com/90349518/gmail-keeps-a-record-of-your-purchase-h...> It’s no secret that Google gathers up large amounts of your data based on your search history. But far less known is that the company has also been automatically tallying up your digital and real-world financial transactions based on receipts found in your Gmail accounts and other Google services. It’s just another sign of the enormous reach of tech titans, including Facebook, mining our real-world transactions to generate new insights into our behavior and new revenue streams. If you have a Google account, see for yourself: In the Google Account Activity section, a tab called “Payments & subscriptions” reveals a page of your Purchases, Subscriptions, and Reservations, along with your stored Payment Methods. The page—which I stumbled upon recently, and which CNBC also reported on—includes transactions, like deliveries and online orders, gathered from receipts or confirmations received in Gmail as well as from Google services like the Google Play Store. (View yours at https://myaccount.google.com/payments-and-subscriptions by clicking on “Manage purchases.”) The data can be eye-opening: a partial catalog of years of purchases that you probably didn’t know Google had yanked from the depths of your digital life. Like many, I’ve long used Gmail like a cabinet or shoebox to keep track of receipts. But I was unaware that I had consented for the Google bots to scan my inbox, identify specific emails, and assemble a dossier of my purchases. Google says the purchase data is not used to target ads and is only viewable by the individual user. “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,” a Google spokesperson explained in an email. The idea is to help you do things like track a package, cancel a reservation, or renew a subscription, according to Google. “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.” Plus, says Google, “you can delete this information at any time.” Not easy to delete But there is a catch. Removing data from “Purchases” requires users to click each purchase individually: There is no way for users to easily delete their entire purchase history from Google’s servers. Removing the original emails doesn’t work either: When CNBC reporter Todd Haselton bravely deleted every single email in his Gmail, the transactions in his purchase history still remained. [...]