Google Bought MasterCard Data To Track Your Offline Purchases For Ad-Targeting

A recent report revealed the search giant Google has been sued for tracking users location even with location turned off on users devices but it seems the search giant is not getting enough even though it had received a $5.04 billion fine for manipulating search result on it search engine a few months ago.

Now, however, according to the latest report from Bloomberg Google has struck a secret deal estimated to be worth millions of dollars with Mastercard to track offline shopping details of credit card users.

Bloomberg also said the two company had been negotiating the deal and has finally come to an agreement after four years of negotiation. However, neither Google nor Mastercard has come to make this announcement public.

In the past, Google already tried to make a connection between online ad clicks and sales in physical stores by relying on Google Wallet, beacons, and users location data as reported. Google claimed that it had access to approximately 70% of U.S. credit and debit cards moreover, the two billion Mastercard holders are also in the dark and have no idea that the offline purchases they make in stores are being tracked by Google to check whether their buying habits are influenced by online ads. It is also unclear if Google has deals in place with other credit card issuers outside of MasterCard.

Sources who are aware of the deal told Bloomberg that Google has developed a tool for advertisers that can tell whether people who clicked on their online ads, purchase the product later at a physical retail store.

When you click on Google ads while being logged into your Google account, even if your action does not convert to any sale your action is recorded. Later on, if the same user uses his/her Mastercard to buy that item from a retail store, Google sends a report to the advertiser to report the same. We all know many users like to research about an item before deciding whether or not to buy and when the same users finally head into a store to buy that item, Google will be able to link their ad click to the transaction by using MasterCard’s data, connecting the email address that you’ve shared with the store to obtain a digital copy of your receipt, or through third-party payment processors.

This report helps the advertiser in measuring the effectiveness of its ads and generates a section for “offline revenue” which enlists all the retail sales.

According to Google’s spokeswoman in a statement to Bloomberg; Google does not access to any personal attached to the credit cards and they do not share any of this data with any of their aad partners. “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,” she said.

Meanwhile, users can opt out of online tracking by toggling off the “Web and App Activity” – which remains on by default.