Google already knows an incredible amount about what you do online – the news you read, the shoes you buy, the emails you send, and the videos you watch, to name just a few.
But now the online search behemouth can increasingly connect your online activity to your offline shopping habits, write Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg in the Washington Post.
According to Ms. Dwoskin and Mr. Timberg:
A prominent privacy rights watchdog is asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate a new Google advertising program that ties consumers’ online behavior to their purchases in brick-and-mortar stores.
The legal complaint from the Electronic Privacy Information Center ... alleges that Google is newly gaining access to a trove of highly sensitive information – the credit and debit card purchase records of the majority of U.S. consumers – without revealing how they got the information or giving consumers meaningful ways to opt out.
[...]
“Google is seeking to extend its dominance from the online world to the real, offline world, and the FTC really needs to look at that,” said Marc Rotenberg, the [Electronic Privacy Information Center]’s executive director.
The process used by Google to link your online and offline behavior is complex, but Ms. Dwoskin and Mr. Timberg have done a good job of distilling out some of the jargon.
The Washington Post detailed Google's program, Store Sales Measurement, in May. Executives have hailed it as a “revolutionary” breakthrough in advertisers’ abilities to track consumer behavior. The company said that, for the first time, it would be able to prove, with a high degree of confidence, that clicks on online ads led to purchases at the cash register of physical stores.
To do this, Google said it had obtained access to the credit and debit card records of 70 percent of U.S. consumers. It had then developed a mathematical formula that would anonymize and encrypt the transaction data, and then automatically match the transactions to the millions of U.S. users of Google and Google-owned services ...
[...]
Google also told The Post that it does not have access to the names or other personal information of the credit and debit card users, and that it does not share any information about individual Google users with partners.
Advertisers receive aggregate information. For example, for an ad campaign for sneakers that received 10,000 clicks, the advertiser learns that 12 percent of the clickers made a purchase.
Contrary to the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s complaint, Google told the Post that consumers with Google accounts can take themselves out of this advertising scheme.
Users can opt out anytime, Google says. To do so, users of Google’s products can go to their My Activity Page, click on Activity Controls, and uncheck “Web and Web Activity,” Google says.
Posts
