Google has been tracking nearly everything you buy online

google-purchase-history

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, according to a new report today from CNBC. Even stranger: this information is made available to you via a private web tool that’s been active for an indeterminate amount of time. You can go view it here.

According to CNBC, the company says it does not use this information for personalized ad tracking; Google said back in 2017 that it would stop using data collected from Gmail messages to personalize ads. You can also delete the information from the Purchases webpage, but you must do so individually for each recorded transaction.

Google, like Facebook, knows an immense amount of information about you, your personal habits, and, yes, what you buy on the internet. And like the social network it dominates the online advertising industry alongside, Google gets this information mostly through background data collection using methods and tools its users may not be fully aware of, like Gmail purchase receipts. This is true of web tools like Gmail and smart assistants, which are increasingly coming under scrutiny for the ways the data that software collects is observed by human employees during the artificial intelligence training process.

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