How to see and delete your shopping history on Google

One piece of news that has been bouncing across all tech sites these days is the discovery that Google is tracking your purchases, but this is nothing new. The information gathering mechanisms that Google does using Gmail mail have been around for some time, with the facilitation of being able to view things like shipping details on the Google Assistant screen on smartphones. Since I had never talked about it here, let's see then how to see the history of purchases made online, how Google records this data, how it can be useful and also how delete and disable this history if you don't want Google to know everything we buy.

How does Google get information about online purchases?

It does this very easily, as is also written in the company's Help Center document: Online purchases and reservations they are extracted from the Google apps used, in particular from receipts that arrive via Email on Gmail. In practice, every time an order confirmation email arrives on sites like Amazon or every time you book through Booking, if the confirmation arrives in Gmail, the information is extracted and saved in a separate account history.

How to see your purchase and booking history on Google

The page to see online purchases on Google, visible only by the user, can be reached by opening the site https://myaccount.google.com/purchases
By clicking on one of the items in the list you can see the details of the order and shipment, with the estimated date of arrival at home and also the price.
By pressing on the lowercase i you see in the detail sheet of each purchase or booking, you can read where this information was taken from, which in most cases is Gmail. From the box that appears, you can click the link to open the email from which the information was extracted.
This history can be useful not only to have an orderly summary of the expenses made, but also to track shipments and see on the fly the dates of receipt of products in one place, even if the purchases were made on different sites and stores. In this way, for example, you can plan detailed tax deductions for the year without going crazy looking for receipts in the various stores.

Can Google be prevented from keeping my purchase history?

In case you are not at all interested in having this type of purchase history or if you don't like the idea that Google can log all this personal data, there is nothing you can do to prevent it. While in fact it is possible to open a card and then press the Remove purchase button at the bottom, there is not, at least for the moment, an option that turn off this Email scan and save feature from Gmail (in fact the purchase history does not appear on the Google activity management page)
There is also no way to clear the entire purchase history, they can only be removed individually as seen above.
The only way to clear all purchases from the history page would be to delete the order confirmation emails, which could take time and patience or be completely off-putting.
The only real option to escape the Google Purchases page would be to not use Gmail. If you make this drastic choice, to make sure you don't end up in another online service that records and reads emails, you can configure, as an email address for receiving receipts on online shopping sites such as Amazon, secure protected mail services. and anonymous with end-to-end encryption such as ProtonMail.

Clear Google history and search data

How to see and delete your shopping history on Google