81–90 of 252 posts
FTA: "Google says it has access to roughly 70% of U.S. credit and debit card transactions through partnerships with companies that track that data." Wow.
MasterCard and Visa not only make money from each credit card transaction but to add insult to injury, they make money selling that transaction data as well! That's what I call a ludicrous business.
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I'm actually surprised that retailers haven't started surcharging people paying in cash by now in order to drive all of individuals' transaction data into the panopticon.
They won't in the medium term because of how much they hate the credit card company's cut. 3% is a lot on an already low-margin transaction at Walmart.
This is likely unpopular, but this makes my job exponentially easier. The number of "What is that click worth" questions to us data driven marketing folks by small businesses effectively closes off a lot of us that focus primarily on the data from that market. With this, there is very real money to be made with small businesses that were too skittish to advertise before. We've been playing with Facebook's online to o…
I worked at a big online advertising agency from 2013-2014 and we had a lot of fortune 500 companies as clients. Google began offering this tracking functionality as a beta in 2014 to a small number of very large companies.
Here's the thing - Google is basically telling advertisers "just trust us to report on our own performance." They are saying buy traffic from us and we will use our secret algorithms to tell you how much revenue we drove and you will have no way to verify the totals.
As you can imagine this is not an attractive proposition.
FTA: "Google says it has access to roughly 70% of U.S. credit and debit card transactions through partnerships with companies that track that data." Wow.
So the only way to break the circle is to purchase with cash... And now fewer and fewer people buy with cash, to the point some Nordics plan on doing away with cash as much as possible.
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It is possible to track the serials, if they wanted to; however, except for banks, I have not exchanged cash with a retailer who scans the bills at the point of transaction and if they did, they'd also have to tie a given ser no with me at the time of purchase. Since a particular bill will go through many hands, it'd be like trying to figure out who made a change on a system when it was done by 'root' or 'administrat…
Sigh, but Google will find a way...
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The reality in the Nordics is already that most people never use cash. I cannot recall making a cash transaction in the past 18 months.
I use cash mainly for convenience at yard sales and crowded bars/events in Finland. There's not many situations you'd need cash if you live in a big city, even yard sale transactions can be made with mobilepay. It's mostly older people using cash anymore.
For example, if you start having kids, and going into their sporting events or whatever, you'll find that any form of electronic payment is most likely not accepted in the pop-up cafeterias ran by parents. No cash? No coffee for you.
Cash is still a handy way to give your kid some money to spend. I know some people already get their second graders a debit card with a monthly allowance, though.
But yes, about 99.5% of the transaction volume in my household is electronic.
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It's very important to keep making as many purchases in cash as possible, precisely for this reason. At least where I live (France), this is very doable. Cash is an anonymous payment system which cannot be traced and is widely accepted. It's something that would be impossible to bootstrap today if it didn't already exist. Hence, it's crucial to keep it alive.
> Cash is an anonymous payment system which cannot be traced Not really; bills are individually identifiable and can be tracked by either party to the transaction, and even if the payment medium isn't tracked, the transaction can even tracked by other means (e.g., cameras + facial recognition.) It's only really untraceable if you assure privacy of the location of the transaction, and neither party to the transaction…
A Googler gave a talk at Real World Crypto in January describing a system that might back this. The relevant part of the talk starts around the 10 minute mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee7oRsDnNNc&t=10m1s In short, they're able to compute the intersection of the set of users who have viewed an ad with the set of people who purchased a product in a store, without either party disclosing their side of the set.
g_i = Google's identifier for customer i. s_j = Merchant identifer for customer j.
If g_i == s_j then customer i == j. These identifiers might be phone numbers or email addresses or other identifiers that both parties have.
Neither party wants the other to learn any identifiers it doesn't already known about.
So Google picks a random secret value G and sends g_i^G to the Merchant. The Merchant picks random secret value T and sends g_i^(G* T) back to Google. Additionally the merchant sends s_j^T to Google.
Then Google calculates s_j^(T* G). If s_j^(T* G) == g_i^(G* T) then s_j == g_i and i == j. So know Google knows the exact set of their users who purchased something at the Merchant.
Additionally, for each s_j^(T), the Merchant sends a homomorphically encrypted value for the amount they spent. Then Google can perform a homomorphic addition on these encrypted values of only the intersection it calculated. The Merchant can then decrypt it to get the total sum and share it back to Google.
So in the scheme I described
1) Google still learns who is purchasing at which merchant. 2) Google does not learn individual amounts. 3) Merchants can't perform the same calculation to learn which users saw their ads unless Google sends s_j^(T* G) back to them (not pictured in the slides).
Report warns computers may threaten constitutional rights (1982)