Google’s Tracking Of Offline Spending Sparks Call For Federal Investigation

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Google’s Tracking Of Offline Spending Sparks Call For Federal Investigation

August 3rd, 2017

Awake Goy

Google recently announced a suite of new tools for advertisers, allowing them to link a customer’s offline credit card purchases with the things they look at online. Shockingly, some privacy advocates think this sort of tracking goes too far and have called on the federal government to investigate.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center this morning filed a complaint [PDF] with the Federal Trade Commission, asking the agency to investigate Google’s Store Sales Management consumer profiling technology and stop the company from tracking customers’ in-store purchases.

According to EPIC, Google’s system, which can allegedly track 70% of all credit and debt card transactions in the U.S., puts the personal information — including product searches, location searches and payment information — of shoppers and Internet users at risk of hacks or other data breaches.

The group alleges that Google is increasing that risk by refusing to reveal details about the algorithm that “deidentifies” — or removes shoppers’ personal details — customers while tracking their purchase.

“Google claims that it can preserve consumer privacy while correlating advertising impressions with store purchases, but Google refuses to reveal—or allow independent testing of the technique that would make this possible,” the complaint states. “The privacy of millions of consumers thus depends on a secret, proprietary algorithm. And although Google claims that consumers can opt out of being tracked, the process is burdensome, opaque, and misleading.”