Secret Deals Have Google Tracking 70% of Credit and Debit Card Data

Advertising is a big business, with Google having been at the forefront for year. Google ad business has managed to grow by 20% each year, with $95.4 billion in sales for 2017. But it's dominance is being displaced by Facebook and Amazon. Investors are worried how long Google can keep up the growth, as some advertisers have even shifted to Amazon which hosts more online shopping to benefit advertisers.

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Google, Facebook and Twitter, not being the shopping and product powerhouse of Amazon, have been looking into offline measurements of purchasing data to better target ads and know which ads work best. One of these methods is the use of "beacons", like Bluetooth tracking when shoppers enter stores.

And for the past year, Google has provided a new tool for some of its advertisers to track the success of their ads and see if an ad online resulted in a sale at a physical store in the US. This data comes from Mastercard data that Google paid for.

But if you're one of two billion Mastercard holders, you aren't aware that your purchasing data may have been sold for tracking purposes. Neither Google nor Mastercard have told the public about this arrangement which Bloomberg has recently uncovered.

This was a huge deal, and it took 4 years of negotiations for the business partnership to be cemented. Four people have come forward to talk about the deal, and three were directly involved in it. Google needed this data to compete against the onslaught of Amazon and others. And they got what they needed to stay in the game.

The privacy concerns are troubling, since we don't know what data is being sold on our behalf, as Christine Bannan of the advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) raises concerns about:

People don't expect what they buy physically in a store to be linked to what they are buying online. There's just far too much burden that companies place on consumers and not enough responsibility being taken by companies to inform users what they're doing and what rights they have.

Google secured this private data by paying millions of dollars and agreeing to share part of the ad revenue. Google has denied what the insiders who want to remain anonymous claim, saying they don't share ad revenue. But they did admit to the existence of the new tool:

Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users' personally identifiable information. We do not have access to any personal information from our partners' credit and debit cards, nor do we share any personal information with our partners. Mastercard admits they provide data to help merchants and their service providers measure "the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns," but does "not provide insights that track, serve up ads to, or even measure ad effectiveness relating to, individual consumers"

Google's service is called "Store Sales Measurement", which they said uses about 70% of the US credit and debit card data. Bloomberg speculates this could be 70% of all US data from credit and debit card companies Google has agreements with. Or it's 70% of all users regardless of agreements based on data they collect through other means like Google accounts that click on Google ads.

Google has confirmed that the service only works on users who are logged into one of its accounts and have not opted out of ad tracking. Google can anonymously match user profiles with purchases made in stores. Google knows that people click on ads and can tell advertisers the ad activity led to an actual sale.

Not all advertisers have access yet, as it's being tested out with a small group first. Apparently they don't see the shopper's personal info, how much they spend, or what they bought exactly. So an advertiser doesn't know if an ad resulted in a purchase directly.

Many people browse and research products online but only buy them in store later on, and not online. This offline behavior is valuable for advertisers to link with digital ads, whereas ads are more easily linked with online purchase. The demand for the gap between online and offline sales has given Google an advantage to tie shopping activity with click activity.

The way the service work is illustrated in this example:

a person searches for "red lipstick" on Google, clicks on an ad, surfs the web but doesn’t buy anything. Later, she walks into a store and buys red lipstick with her Mastercard. The advertiser who ran the ad is fed a report from Google, listing the sale along with other transactions in a column that reads "Offline Revenue" -- only if the web surfer is logged into a Google account online and made the purchase within 30 days of clicking the ad. The advertisers are given a bulk report with the percentage of shoppers who clicked or viewed an ad then made a relevant purchase. Mastercard's spokesman said the company does not view data on the individual items purchased inside stores.

So it' snot an exact match between an ad leading to a sale, but it gives a statistical approximation that may or may not be the reality. Though it's currently the most powerful advertiser tool to measure shopping in the real world. Christina Malcolm, director at the digital ad agency iProspect relays how successful the new service is to Bloomber:

Malcolm said her agency has tested the card measurement tool with a major advertiser, which she declined to name. Beforehand, the company received $5.70 in revenue for every dollar spent on marketing in the ad campaign with Google, according to an iProspect analysis. With the new transaction feature, the return nearly doubled to $10.60.

Ad buyers vouch for Google integrity to keep transactions info separate from web behavior. Neither Google nor its payment partners have access to the data each collect, according to Jules Polonetsky, head of the Future Privacy Forum who was briefed by Google about the "novel encryption method" of the product:

They're sharing data that has been so transformed that, if put in the public, no party could do anything with it.

The Future Privacy Forum is a non-profit, but Google is one of 10 companies that it received funding from. It's all legal though, even if people don't like it. Google has a found way to keep more of the advertising industry, and get more people to invest in Google. It seems the expected 20% increase in ad revenue will stay on track for 2018. Meanwhile, our data keeps getting used more and more to make Google rich. Why don't we get a piece of the pie? We're not even being told of these secret agreement or how our data is being used. It's somewhat conniving.

If you want to opt out of this undisclosed tracking of your shopping behavior, turn of ad tracking through Google's "Web and App Activity" online console. That's about the only thing you can do. I have my Bluetooth and GPS tracking turned off all the time as well. I don't like them being able to track where I go in real life.

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