> with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it doesn’t actually include what I bought
Anyone have a factual source that confirms that gmail is mining receipt data for advertising?
You seem to be equating “mining” with “selling to third parties”, I don’t think it’s the common use (I understand it as “gathering data”).
Also there’s many ways to exploit the purchase data without ever selling it outside the company, including using it in aggregate for ad targeting without exposing specifics to the ad buyer.
Anyone have a factual source that confirms that gmail is mining receipt data for advertising?
One refutation https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-gmail-purchases-priv... said in 2019 that Google’s Purchase’s page said “Google won't sell the [Purchases] information or use it to choose which ads you see”; however I did just log into Google and looked at https://myaccount.google.com/purchases and couldn’t find that text now, so who knows if that is still true.
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067714 refers to a second refutation from 2017 - “Google Will No Longer Scan Gmail for Ad Targeting”.
Edit: I did read an article talking about other companies scanning receipts to target advertising, so that could be a motivation of Amazon’s.