Google data mine digs into credit card privacy
Company’s new system tracks credit card transactions to work out whether online adverts are influencing purchases both on the web and in offline stores
Google has begun using billions of credit card transaction records to prove that its online ads are prompting people to make purchases – even when they happen offline in bricks-and-mortar stores – the online search engine says.
The advance allows Google to determine how many sales have been generated by digital ad campaigns, a goal that industry insiders have long described as the holy grail of online advertising. But the announcement also renewed long-standing privacy complaints about how the company uses personal information.
To power its multibillion-dollar advertising juggernaut, Google already analyses users’ web browsing, search history and geographic locations, using data from popular Google-owned apps, such as YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and the Google Play store. All that information is tied to the real identities of users when they log into Google’s services.
While we developed the concept for this product years ago, it required years of effort to develop a solution that could meet our stringent user privacy requirements.
The new credit card data enables the tech giant to connect these digital trails to real-world purchase records in a far more extensive way than was possible before. But in doing so, Google is yet again treading in territory that consumers may consider too intimate and potentially sensitive.