Last year, when Google announced its new service Store Sales Measurement, it was reported that the company has access to «approximately 70%» of credit and debit cards USA through their partners, but their names are not called. Now, thanks to a Bloomberg investigation, it became known that the partner who provided the technology giant credit card data. It turned out to Mastercard Inc.
An anonymous source told the publication that the negotiations between the two companies was conducted over four years, and that partnership cost Google several million dollars.
The agreement helped Google advertisers to access a powerful new tool to track the transition from online ads to offline shopping USA followed there buy the advertised product.
However, the majority of the 2 billion owners of Mastercard don’t know about this: the company never reported their agreement, which is valid for a year.
At Mastercard declined to comment on the partnership with Google, however, her spokesman Seth Eisen said that the Corporation provides sellers and service providers information about trends (sales volume and average number of purchases) to assess «the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns.» «Any individual transaction or personal information is not provided,» said Eisen.
Google also declined to comment on the deal with Mastercard, but stressed that they have no «access to personal information on credit and debit cards of our partners.» «Before launching last year this beta product, we have developed a new technology for double-blind encryption, which does not allow Google and its partners to see the personal information of our users,» — said in a statement. Moreover, each user may at any time disable tracking view ads by logging in to your account in the console «Internet and app».
Previously, we reported that Google allows third-party companies to access emails of millions of people.
