Bloomberg is reporting that for the past year select Google advertisers have been able to track whether online advertisements have resulted in an offline purchase. This is due to a partnership between Mastercard and Google. Google paid millions of dollars for the data that Mastercard provides and there were also discussions surrounding sharing a portion of ad revenue. I imagine most readers aren’t aware of this data sharing agreement, it’s possible to opt out on Google’s end by doing the following, navigate to ‘personal info & privacy’ when logged into your account, then manage your activity, then activity controls and toggle off web & app activity. Privacy experts have been critical of Mastercard for not providing a way to opt out of their transactions being shared and it isn’t clear if Mastercard is the only one providing payment information as Google claim that the ‘store sales measurement’ had access to “approximately 70 percent” of U.S. credit and debit cards. Given that Mastercard doesn’t have close to 70% market share the logical conclusion would be that either American Express/Visa are also providing data or Google has convinced individual issuers to do provide data as well.
Hat tip to VFTW
