Google Tracks Your Offline Purchases
By Prempal Singh
Google runs the world’s major and most profitable online ad network, but the lion’s share of advertisement dollars still go to TV. The search monster is looking to improve that by associating online advertising with purchases in the real world — your purchases. Google has combined with companies in charge of checking purchase data, which provides the of usage of about 70 percent of all US credit and debit cards transactions. This all comes off as a little scary, but Google is determined that it’s not scary in any way.
Right now, Google and other online advertisers lack the information to draw a strong interconnection between online advertising and purchases in real life. Google has the tools to track what you buy online, assuming you remain logged into your account and choose to share your browsing data. Offline, Google can do little more than observing your location to imagine what you’re buying and peek at data from Android Pay. Google’s hope is that offline purchase data will verify that the advertising you see online do, in fact, influence what you purchase in real life. That could induced companies to increase ad spending online, which might be a windfall for Google.
The new wealth of data from brick-and-mortar merchants will allow Google to associate your real life purchases with the advertising it shows you online. For illustration, if you clicked on an ad while looking for a brand new camera, but didn’t buy anything, the advertiser would conclude the ad didn’t work. Nevertheless, what if you traveled to the advertiser’s physical store and bought it? That’s potentially even more valuable to the marketer, but Google needs a way to hook up those two actions.
Google says it anonymizes the data it uses to identify users in ad monitoring by converting all personal information to a thread of characters. Neither Google nor third-parties can hook up that value to a real person. Therefore, officially all an advertiser understands is that unique ID saw an ad on the internet and then showed up in a shop to buy something. The sole big difference now is that your specific ID will be appearing in real life.
If you’re still getting the heebie-jeebies out of this, Google does include enough personal privacy tools to limit what data it can acquire and use. Swing by your Google Dashboard and log in with your account. You are able to turn off ad personalization and use your activity controls to stop Google from collecting data from searches, location, and more. Keep in mind, many Google services will be less useful if you turn these features off. Alternatively, you can just stay logged away of Google unless you specifically need to gain access to your account.
Source: www.extremetech.com