Your purchases, subscriptions and reservations in Gmail
by Volker Weber
Does this list scare you? It really should not. This information lives in your mail archive. Remove the mail and it disappears. Of course Google indexes your mail file. That is how you find stuff very quickly. This list is just a categorized view of the information in your mail file, for your convenience.
You don't want Google to have that information? Don't give Google your emails, in other words, don't use Gmail.
Comments
"Remove the mail and it disappears" - not sure if that is true. I switched from GMail to another provider years ago, and deleted all mails in my inbox (the account is still active). But my account history still lists some hotel reservations from six years ago. One more reason to quit Gmail.
Apart from one payment service, both of my lists are empty. I wasn't expecting that!
I have to correct myself on this, it actually does work like you describe. There were some ancient e-mails left in my GMail inbox that I forgot to delete. Now that they are gone, so are the hotel reservations in my account overview.
It could not be any other way. It is just another view into your mail box. The alarmists are chasing a ghost.
I really like Google search. I did the minute I saw it for the first time in 1999. Clean, fast, unmatched results until today. I know it learns my preferences, hence the good results, and it is funded by advertising, which is sometimes annoying. But there is no such thing as a free lunch and I learned to ignore the ads which are not super-intrusive anyway.
I never liked Gmail though. Nor Android. So I don't use them. Simple as that.
I would translate the mail delete function in gmail more like “hide from ui”. This is not related to data in the lazier background index. results or tags (or whatever is used) derived from analyzing content will also remain in the Profile Google only maintains for user benefits.
Having used Gmail for years, I'm astonished at how little information it has in those lists for me. I guess I do almost everything of that sort from my business email. On the other hand, Google probably has an extremely comprehensive view of literary agents I've queried and poems and stories I've had published.
