Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
51–60 of 294 posts
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you unGoogle? They have my phone, my email. Amazon now follows my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. I doubt Visa and Amex are far behind, it's free money for them so there is no point in canning Master. What a disaster! Ad supported Internet is the root of the problem.
You can use ios or lineageos. You can use an email such as protonmail (although I personally find them just a touch shady, they're no doubt miles better than gmail) or host your own. Don't shop at whole foods. Pay with cash.
Just out of curiosity, what feels shady about ProtonMail?
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#53I don't understand how they can correlate a sale to a specific google account without getting personal identification data. By definition if they can associate a transaction with a user, the user has been identified and has lost all privacy.
They double ROT-13 the email address that each side collected so they can correlate, but not identify, individual consumers -- or something, TFA didn't specify the actual encryption algorithm.
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#54Privacy focused payment products will be more in demand because of these kind of things. I look forward to it !
Unlikely. What will end up happening is that MasterCard will be making money from this deal, which will incentivize it to either drop merchant fees (leading to merchant offers for buyers to use MasterCard) or increase card member benefits to get more data to sell, which will make people use MasterCard cards more.
The average buyer would rather get cash back to allow Google to report to merchants how their ads resulted in credit card payments than to not get cash back and hide this information. This is the same economics for how loyalty card programs work.
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#55Privacy focused payment products will be more in demand because of these kind of things. I look forward to it !
Yeah, this is like them stepping into my house. This whole time they’ve been peering through every window but now, they’ve let themselves in.
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you unGoogle? They have my phone, my email. Amazon now follows my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. I doubt Visa and Amex are far behind, it's free money for them so there is no point in canning Master. What a disaster! Ad supported Internet is the root of the problem.
You can use ios or lineageos. You can use an email such as protonmail (although I personally find them just a touch shady, they're no doubt miles better than gmail) or host your own. Don't shop at whole foods. Pay with cash.
Thank you, I am aware of the alternatives but it's an uphill battle to fight a monopoly, i.e. I have only Comcast here as Internet option, etc.
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#57The key here is "double-blind encryption" - assuming they got that right, neither can see exactly what I am buying, so I'm good. Bigger point: I'd be ok with any company tracking my activities _as long as_ one of two conditions are met: a) it benefits me (and me only), or b) it benefits them _but_ they cannot identify me.
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Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could move to Apple and use Apple Pay Cash to buy purchases you'd rather not be tracked and sold to Google (and a million other companies).
[correction: Apple Pay Cash should indeed be a workable shield.] Using Apple Pay [not the "Cash" feature] only hides your details from the retailer, not from the credit card company nor evidently from Google.
https://applepaycash.greendot.com/termsconditions/
It appears that Apple Pay cash doesn’t share much, although they do say ‘We may disclose information that is not personally identifiable for other purposes.’
What they mean exactly by ‘personally identifiable’ is open to interpretation.
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#59The key here is "double-blind encryption" - assuming they got that right, neither can see exactly what I am buying, so I'm good. Bigger point: I'd be ok with any company tracking my activities _as long as_ one of two conditions are met: a) it benefits me (and me only), or b) it benefits them _but_ they cannot identify me.
The privacy aspects are important, but it is also worth considering the impact this sort of stuff has on society. We like to think of ourselves as semi-immune to advertisement (and manipulation), but we really aren't. The 2016 presidential election proved that. Putting more and more data into the hands of Google and others just gives them more power over the public at large. Are we OK with that? Is the discussion even really happening?
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#60" With it, marketers see aggregate sales figures and estimates of how many they can attribute to Google ads -- but they don’t see a shoppers’ personal information, how much they spend or what exactly they buy. The tests are only available for retailers, not the companies that make the items sold inside stores, the spokeswoman said. The service only applies to its search and shopping ads, she said."