Google Reportedly Bought People's Banking Data In Secret

Google Reportedly Bought People's Banking Data In Secret, And That Isn't Even The Bad News In a post-capitalistic world that seems very specifically and violently designed to rip off the poor for the benefit of the rich, spending money is complicated. But at least, until recently, you could live without fear that some multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley giant would buy up your banking data in order to serve you more effective ads. Based on new details about an apparent arrangement between Google and Mastercard, those days are over. Bloomberg reports that, after four years of negotiations, Google purchased a trove of credit card transaction data from Mastercard, allegedly for “millions of dollars”. Google then reportedly used that data to provide select advertisers with a tool called “store sales measurement” that the company quietly announced in a blog post last year, though it failed to mention the inclusion of Mastercard data in the workflow. The tool can track how online ads lead to real-world purchases, and that extra data is designed to make Google’s ad products more appealing to advertisers. (Read: Everybody makes more money this way.) The public was not informed of the reported Mastercard deal, though advertisers have had access to the transaction data for at least a year, according to Bloomberg. This is a hell of a bombshell, when you think about it. Thanks in part to heavy government regulation, credit card and banking data has long been private. If you wanted to spend $98 at Sephora on a Tuesday afternoon, that transaction was between you, your bank and Sephora. It now appears that Google has found a way to weasel its way into the data pipeline that connects consumers and their purchases. If you clicked on a Sephora ad while logged in to Google in the past year and then bought stuff at Sephora with a Mastercard in the past year, there’s a chance Google knows about that, at least on some level, and uses that data help its advertisers stuff their coffers. But when you consider everything else that Google knows about you, the proposition becomes more Orwellian. Google told Gizmodo in a statement, also shared with Bloomberg, that it encrypts and anonymises the credit card transaction data that it’s using with the new ad tool. There’s no getting around the fact that Google becomes a more powerful, all-seeing ad engine when it can see specific details about people’s spending habits, even if they’re anonymised and used in aggregate, as Google says the data it gets from Mastercard is. This future — one where your email, your search history, your social connections and now your spending habits — is one that we should really be scared of, say privacy advocates. “To entrust and nominate one platform as the sole protector and guardian of your information, that’s really dangerous,” Gennie Gephart of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told Gizmodo. “It’s a lot like having listening devices in your home. It’s bringing this technology into more and more areas of our lives that used to be sacred: the home, the school, financial information, health information.” It’s not so much that Google has been using credit card data to help advertisers run more effective ads. It’s that Google is doing these things on a tremendous scale, and and the full nature of what it’s been doing was kept secret. The reported arrangement between Google and Mastercard immediately drew comparisons to the recent saga of Facebook reportedly meeting with banks in an attempt to gain access to its users’ private financial data. According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook wanted detailed financial information, such as transaction account balances and even individual transactions. Sources said that Facebook wanted to build chatbots for Messenger so that people could ask a robot simple banking questions, such as their current transaction account balance. Realistically, Facebook could be doing a lot more with that kind of data. READ MORE https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/09/google-reportedly-bought-peoples-banking-data-in-secret-and-that-isnt-even-the-bad-news/