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May 29th, 2017 
Awake Goy
Google Now Tracks Your Credit Card Purchases and Connects Them to Its Online Profile of You
May 29th, 2017
Via: MIT Technology Review:
Google’s new ability to match people’s offline credit card purchases to their online lives is a stunning display of surveillance capitalism in action.
The capability, which Google unveiled this week, allows the company to connect the dots between the ads that it shows its users and what they end up actually buying. This is a crucial link for Google’s business that, for all of the company’s inventiveness, remains a matter of attracting users to its predominantly free services, collecting user data, and leveraging that data to sell advertising. If Google can show that someone who saw an ad for a furniture store in Google Maps, say, then went and made a big purchase at that store, the store’s owner is much more likely to run more ads.
Of course, Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties� that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
So, if you buy stuff with a card, there’s a less than one-in-three chance that Google doesn’t know about it.
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