> To be honest, I actually think it's probably more privacy-conscious to eliminate as much information as possible (but no more) from these kinds of emails.
But that makes them useless for what they are, especially the shipping ones: "You made three orders recently, one shipped. If you actually want to know which one (and you haven't memorized your order IDs) click here!"
This is actually a pretty annoying regression for me, because I buy things from many sites and have no way to search my overall order history anymore.
> Email is an insecure and non-private medium, but we often use it for items that require some level of security or privacy. I'd prefer if more companies held that information closely.
It is, but there's no better system and ruining email doesn't solve that privacy problem (e.g. Amazon may sell this information). At a minimum, it should be a setting so people can opt to get useful emails if they want to make that tradeoff.
Yep. The decision for Google to have access to the contents of my email is mine, not Amazon's (or whoever else). It's the decision I make when I use a Gmail account, and it's up to me to decide that based on Google' privacy policies and reputation.
If I don't want Google to have any access then I'll use a different provider or self host my email. If I want to publish all of my emails publicly that's also my decision.
your usage is probably much higher than is mine, but generally any purchase doesn't require my attention to shipping. if it's mission critical or I'm impatient I obsessively reload tracking.
on the other hand I don't like having stores advertise to me online because Google slurps up my purchase data.
for me the privacy - or the sandboxing if Amazon sells the data - is worth the inconvenience. but that's like just my opinion, dude
But that makes them useless for what they are, especially the shipping ones: "You made three orders recently, one shipped. If you actually want to know which one (and you haven't memorized your order IDs) click here!"
This is actually a pretty annoying regression for me, because I buy things from many sites and have no way to search my overall order history anymore.
> Email is an insecure and non-private medium, but we often use it for items that require some level of security or privacy. I'd prefer if more companies held that information closely.
It is, but there's no better system and ruining email doesn't solve that privacy problem (e.g. Amazon may sell this information). At a minimum, it should be a setting so people can opt to get useful emails if they want to make that tradeoff.