Google Has an Agreement With MasterCard to Spy On Your Daily Purchases!

Google has an agreement with MasterCard to establish links between online advertisements and physical shopping!

The web giant pays money to the payment solution company for offline purchases from customers in the United States.

Last year, Google announced the launch of a service called "In-store sales measurement". The company then claimed to have access to approximately 70 % of US credit and debit cards through partners it carefully avoided naming. The mystery has just been lifted this week by Bloomberg.

The site reveals that Google has reached an agreement with MasterCard. It would pay millions of dollars to know what its customers buy in physical shops. The problem was that consumers were totally unaware of this practice. (Yes, we’ve already seen that I know…)

No personal data...

It would be only about a program in test. To be targeted you must be MasterCard customer in the United States, have a Gmail account and not decline the advertising tracking in the Google services settings. The Mountain View giant disclaims any specific comment on his relations with MasterCard but assures that his program does not allow him to have access to the personal information and to user identities. The spent amounts and the exact purchases would also not be transmitted.

But crossed profiles

Still, it can associate anonymous user profiles with purchases made in physical stores. By matching these data with its own, it knows which Internet users have clicked on advertisements and can thus reveal to advertisers if their campaign has generated real sales. This also gives it an enormous advantage over Amazon, as the two giants fight a ruthless battle to better understand the interactions between web advertising and offline shopping.

From its part, MasterCard also refuses to talk about the agreement. But still, tell only to share transaction trends with merchants and service providers. The information would concern essentially the sales volumes.

Bloomberg calls back that, according to Nilson Report, purchases made with MasterCard cards represented approximately a quarter of the US purchasing volumes in 2017.

What are the limits to their knowledge of our habits?

But beyond the question of the transactions amount and the correspondence established with on-line behavior, this case raises the disturbing question of all the information that Google and consorts accumulates on the users, even if they remain anonymous.

In this particular case the affair seems to only concern the United States but are there not similar agreements elsewhere in the world, in Europe, for example, despite texts like the RGPD? Doubt is allowed.

The level of the profiles accuracy so established reaches a potentially terrible threshold. Especially as we still do not have the reflex to think that our online activities and our purchases in the real world can be bounded. We did not know, until now, that we must protect ourselves from it, we are now informed.

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