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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.
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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.
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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.
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Meanwhile, users can opt out of online tracking by toggling off the “Web and App Activity” – which remains on by default.
While 5G technology is yet to be adopted across the world, LG has already started making preparations for 6G technology. LG hasn’t been doing quite well in the mobile segment, although we saw a few smartphones from the company last year, perhaps this movement towards 6G technology might help revive her drowning mobile market.
The company just announced the opening of a dedicated 6G research centre to ‘lead in next-generation mobile telecommunications, located in the Yuseong District of Daejeon, South Korea.
According to the company, it will use the institute’s personnel and infrastructure to preemptively secure technology for 6G.
The company further said: “We want to secure core technologies for sixth generation wireless network ahead of time,”.
The transition from 5G to 6G will take up to 10 years, the company said but it wants to “prepare for the future industry”.
Total Online privacy is something many are wanting but only close to none are getting, this will be changing as a UK company will be launching a Tor-enabled sim card soon.
Tor-enabled SIM Card is coming 2019
Until now, total online privacy has only been available for web surfing and it either requires an installation of a third party software, paying for a VPN(Virtual Private Network) or doing a series of configuration. After doing all this complete privacy is expected but not gotten because ISP and VPN providers still manage to put users under surveillance and invade privacies.
This is issue prompt Brass Horn, a UK based company to design a Tor-enabled sim card, Tor on its own is one of the ways to stay anonymous online and to access onion websites popularly known as dark-web. This Tor-enabled sim card requires no configurations to use reason been all configuration has been hard-coded into it, although the user still as to create an access point.
The Founder of Brass Horn, Llewellyn told Motherboard that is organization is “about sticking a middle finger up to mobile filtering, mass surveillance.” meaning his organization will be blessing UK residence with a close to perfect online privacy including anonymously facebook, twitter and several other social media that seems impossible to stay anonymous on.
Llewellyn will also be putting effort into building more nodes to improve Tor’s anonymity and also increasing its speed which is annoyingly slow irrespective on the ISP. This Tor-enabled sim card will also be providing protection to users should in case the user connect to Wi-Fi and also if users private IP was leaked, it will ensure it traces back to neither the user nor Brass Horn has its ISP, a beta test of this sim-card has already been released and it only available to Android users.
It was said that when the alpha version of this Tor-enabled sim card is released, it will have Orbot an android version of the Tor browser. It was also said that this sim-card will be costing 2.0GBP per month and 0.025 per megabyte transferred over the network and payment method will be via credit cards or cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Monero, or Zcash.
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