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Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
- ilove_banh_mi 8y agoDo I have a choice, other than cancelling all of my MasterCard cards? This business of tracking and profiling is increasingly evil. If I dystopically discovered that someone has been following me around all the time, writing down everything I look at or do or purchase, in public and at home, I could not tolerate it.
- drtillberg 8y agoMaybe a simple NYCE debit card? Apparently they are widely accepted at POS.
- mtmail 8y agoFrom the article "The company said people can opt out of ad tracking using Google’s “Web and App Activity” online console. Inside Google, multiple people raised objections that the service did not have a more obvious way for cardholders to opt out of the tracking, one of the people said."
- ilove_banh_mi 8y agoI did read the article. That's discovering that someone is stalking you, until and unless you tell them you'd rather "opt out" even though you never "opted in" the evil stalking. Meanwhile, all shops and businesses you get near to or purchase from are calling the stalker to let him know what you're doing -- how do you "opt out" of these?
- metafizikal 8y agoOn the other hand, most credit cards already sell transaction data to third parties.
- losteric 8y agoHey at least the credit card companies are fully transparent - all that is clearly outlined in the 20-page size-3 font terms and conditions you signed up with! /s It's ridiculous that credit cards, the primary mode of online purchases and strongly preferred by physical retailers, is dominated by just two/three companies... all of which freely sell your purchase histories to other companies.
- mattigames 8y agoThat's free market for you; meaning people with more money than you set up a system so even handling money itself costs you money and they also try to squeeze even more money doing shady things such as tracking your shopping patterns. This is the kind of stuff where the government should have a heavy hand on regulations (unfortunately the members of the government like anyone else are incentivized by money so guess who has a lot of it to "lobby" them.)
- thaumaturgy 8y agoBuy less stuff. It maybe isn't an ideal solution, but it has a lot of upsides. Advertisers (and ad middlemen like Google) bet that they can sell more stuff by drilling deeper and deeper into people's lives. But the bottom falls out of all that when people decide to opt out of large parts of the commercial ecosystem. Track your finances instead, the same way you would with a fitness app, and get that dopamine hit from seeing your savings increase. Feel secure in the knowledge that when the next major economic slump hits -- when, not if -- you'll be able to easily ride it out, maybe even enjoy a nice vacation at discounted rates. The massive growth of ad blockers was an immune response to the excesses of advertisers on the web. Commercial minimalism is the only way to respond to all this crap happening everywhere else.
- Moru 8y agoOr do like the germans that remember the old times of big brother watching you. Use cash. When I'm shopping it isn't just the old ladys digging deep and long in their purse for the exact change, almost everyone pays with cash.
- 4ad 8y agoHow do I pay with cash on amazon.com?
- donarb 8y agoYou can buy Amazon gift cards with cash anywhere like drug and grocery stores.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoHowever, you have other problems: If you have an account, or even a consistent shipping address, Amazon knows what you're buying. So you'd need to anonymize where you're shipping packages to, the names on those packages, and you'd need to register new Amazon accounts regularly with new email addresses to avoid them profiling your purchasing habits.
- DeepYogurt 8y agoPull money out at an ATM and pay for things with cash I guess. Not great, but it's an option.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoDo you think gift cards would shield you enough? I mean they can be tied to the card used to purchase. But are the data-mongers doing that?
- mulmen 8y agoGift cards can be purchased with cash.
- orbitingpluto 8y agoAs long as you don't travel on a highway where the money will be seized by law enforcement by use of civil asset forfeiture due to your suspiciously carrying cash.
- mrep 8y agoI believe that limit is $10,000 and you never use a credit card when spending that amount of money because the transaction fees are too high.
- CynicalDio 8y agoThe limit is not 10,000. There may be an official number where that starts happening but I have seen it happen (completely anecdotal) with amounts as low as $800.
- mrep 8y agoCare to tell your story because that is totally fucked up if a cop took a measly $800 in cash from you?
- tracker1 8y agoCash?
- doug3465 8y agoDo you really believe they stop tracking your data even if you opt out after recent events?
- unethical_ban 8y agohttps://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols by the way.
- ilove_banh_mi 8y agoFollowed the link. Read the description at https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068 There is absolutely nothing written about this being a way to opt out of their purchasing and tracking credit card use.
- shostack 8y agoAnd if I still want to use some of those features (because some are useful and I don't care about that data), it doesn't appear I can opt out of this specifically?
- tjoff 8y agoI have to create a google account and link it to my mastercard somehow just to be able to opt out?!
- kappaseven 8y agoWasn't this "Web and App Activity" just this month found to keep its own location history when Location Services are disabled? Seems like they've loaded a lot of different behaviors into this one setting.
- pointillistic 8y agoHow 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.
- anothergoogler 8y agore: Whole Foods, I've never heard of a place that was a food desert but for Whole Foods. You should take your business somewhere else if you don't want Amazon to have data on your grocery purchases.
- PNWChris 8y agoFunny anecdote, my fiance used to live in midtown Detroit near the Whole Foods. At the time the groceries situation was worse, it was more-or-less a food desert other than that Whole Foods [0]. I don't know how folks who can't afford a car would get groceries (an hour round trip on the bus, I guess), but that can be said about nearly everything in Michigan. The whole wealth bootstrapping problem is really unsolved out there, you can't get started on anything without like $5k for a car and car-related expenses. [0]: https://www.google.com/maps/search/midtown+detroit+groceries/@42.3446326,-83.0652096,14z/data=!3m1!4b1 https://www.google.com/maps/search/midtown+detroit+groceries...
- toomuchtodo 8y ago> Amazon now follows my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. Shop at Aldi. https://aldi.us/stores/ https://aldi.us/stores/
- losteric 8y agoOr pay cash!
- earenndil 8y agoYou 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.
- amelius 8y agoMove to Europe, where there are sane laws against this type of behavior.
- Tharkun 8y agoWhat makes you think MC and Google aren't doing the same thing in Europe?
- foepys 8y agoIf they do, I hope they get caught and have to pay 4% of their global revenue under GDPR.
- ionised 8y agoThere are laws against them doing this in Europe.
- dagw 8y agoBloody nanny state socialists and their business destroying government overreach. No wonder they'll never catch up with Silicon Valley. /s
- Tharkun 8y agoAre you referring to GDPR? As far as I can tell, the data is allegedly anonymous, so not subject to GDPR. Even if it weren't, Google doesn't exactly have a good track record of respecting privacy or privacy related laws. They've been known to "accidentally" harvest wifi traffic in bulk. They drive spy cars around taking pictures or everything and everyone.
- codedokode 8y agoIf they were anonymous Google wouldn't be able to match purchases against ad views or let users opt out. I suppose they are just exchanging something like a hash from customer data, so technically Google doesn't get personal information.
- paulie_a 8y agoConsidering in my experience most debit cards are typically MasterCard, good luck.
- colechristensen 8y agoYou never had a choice. Paying with plastic always meant that you were tracked and that data sold. If you don't like it, use cash.
- cm2187 8y agoBanking data has strong regulatory protection. I am surprised payment data hasn't.
- 3pt14159 8y agoCash is tracked by the banks. It's usually pretty easy too, especially with things like coffee shops that take a lot of 20s and give a lot of 5s. Most people take out 20s, so it's pretty easy to know who was likely at some place at some day or week.
- spydum 8y agonot even remotely the same league.. I've never once heard of cash analytics for spend habits the same I have seen for cardholder/loyalty programs.
- 3pt14159 8y agoIt's tracked to the person and has been for decades. It's used to fight crime, not to help advertisers.
- jonknee 8y agoWell then get your cash from a teller because it will not be scanned before it's handed to you.
- tomrod 8y agoInteresting. I haven't seen retail banks tracking cash this way.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- taurath 8y agoThe only choice is to lobby your government officials to create laws preventing this sort of data collection. End-users have zero power anymore except by collective action in the form of government regulations.
- cycrutchfield 8y agoWhat a flawed analogy. This isn’t anything close to stalking. You are using a credit card processing service. If you don’t like what they do with your data, use a different one or just pay everything with cash.
- mattigames 8y agoPretty sure there are a lot of companies that do not offer their hires the option to be paid in cash, its bank account or nothing. Plus some countries are moving to card-only economy where some stores don't take cash.
- a3_nm 8y agoThe best way to encourage shops to accept cash, and generally encourage countries to stick with cash, is to use cash whenever possible.
- ilove_banh_mi 8y agoHow long until a big-tech company starts to log, track, and connect banknote serial numbers from ATM to store? I wouldn't be surprised if ATMs already record the serial number of each note they distribute.
- m1573rp34130dy 8y agobuy something your friends need at a place you rarely shop and get cash back...then go do your cash on hand shopping...
- tdb7893 8y agoI feel like as consumers we've lost this battle. If it's profitable the other companies will do it, too. I'm hoping that as consumers keep getting more screwed we can get some regulation to give us at least a little control and visibility into our data.
- noelsusman 8y agoYour only option is to refuse cards altogether because they've all been selling anonymized data on you for years. The big hedge funds pay big dollars for direct lines of data from the credit card companies.
- bigiain 8y ago"anonymized" 100% deserves/needs scare quotes around that. I mean just look at the snake-oil bullshit wording Google are using to describe what they do here: "Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information,” I mean, I guess there are proper cryptographic means by which you could achieve something that matches that description. But does _anyone_ trust the worlds biggest advertising company to be doing that???
- spydum 8y agoOut of all the other possible parties that could have attempted this? Yup, I'd say I trust them the most.
- taneq 8y agoWhat Google can do and what they choose to do are two different things.
- bigiain 8y agoI don't doubt one bit that they have people capable and probably even willing to get the crypto right. I _strongly_ doubt they have the corporate will or motivation to actually put it into production. I'd go so far as to say "getting it right" is antithetical to their (enormously profitable and deeply entrenched) business model.
- spydum 8y agoI don't know about that. Measuring ad impact is extremely valuable. What is interesting to me is the obvious bias of being the seller of ads as well as the impact measurement provider.. fox guarding the henhouse and all
- microcolonel 8y agoMasterCard has also started cracking down on customers whose speech they dislike. A Patreon creator was just a couple weeks ago removed because his content was disliked by MasterCard, who gave Patreon basically no choice in the matter. I think that if Visa doesn't remain largely neutral (keeping its policies as minimally political as they are currently), there will be a considerable market for a principled creditor (maybe Discover becomes that, or a new player is born).
- prepend 8y agoDon’t worry, they only use it anonymously. Until they don’t want to.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoI'm with you. Short answer...pay cash.
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoEffectively that's already the case. I gurantee if you live in modern society, eg. drive a car, use a phone, go on public transit, shop online or in stores with plastic etc... your "pattern of life" would be trivial to put together. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern-of-life_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern-of-life_analysis
- walrus01 8y agoIf you consider in aggregate all of the government and corporate tracking and surveillance these days, the only way to opt out is to move to an off grid shack in the Montana woods and live a lifestyle like Ted Kaczynsky. I am about 85% serious here.
- phobosdeimos 8y agoMoving to Europe? I have always despised creditcards, their business model is anti consumer and legalised theft. Luckily I live in a country that has superior payment options.
- espadrine 8y agoWhich country is it? What payment systems do you use?
- HohPum1l 8y agoIn Germany direct debit (pull) is common and the EU is currently rolling out instant wire transfers (push). Either way cuts out the third party as you're paying directly from your bank account and banks are far more regulated wrt. privacy.
- KozmoNau7 8y agoUnfortunately, you'll find it rather annoying to pay for a rental car. If you use a debit card, they'll pull an additional €250 deposit, which you won't get back until you return the car. If you pay by credit card, it just goes through without having to pay the deposit. It's one of the reasons why I begrudgingly got a Mastercard, and also for the travel insurance. That's basically all I use it for, though. I think there's some additional electronics insurance or something, but the basic warranties here are pretty good already.
- tomcooks 8y agoBitcoin, minus LE EPIC CRIPTO CRAZEH, was supposed to fix this specific idiocy.
- xiphias 8y agoLightning network for Bitcoin has multiple privacy features, though it's still only in beta and will probably take a few years to have some adoption.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- remusrm 8y agoI am canceling this, i am tired of this tracking and spying... is just too damn much!
- yuhong 8y agoThere is a reason why I wrote my Google DoubleClick essay. What is fun is that credit cards directly ties an increase in debt to consumer spending, which in turn goes to Google as ad dollars in this case
- bamboozled 8y agoPrivacy focused payment products will be more in demand because of these kind of things. I look forward to it !
- lern_too_spel 8y agoUnlikely. 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.
- iscrewyou 8y agoYeah, 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.
- ethbro 8y agoWell, yeah. They realized there's money laying on the floor of your house. Why wouldn't they pick it up?
- throwawayperson 8y agoFinancial crime risks?
- InfamousSub 8y agoCash
- cm2187 8y agoI 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.
- jstarfish 8y agoGoogle users give up their PII the moment they sign up for an account. If you also use Google Wallet or pay for any Google service, you've given them the ability to associate some representation of your credit cards with you as well. Together with Location Services, they know everywhere you physically go, so given the last 4 digits of your cards and a transaction list it's pretty easy to guess who you are.
- UncleEntity 8y agoThey 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.
- bigiain 8y ago"double blind" == "dual ROT13" - of course!!!
- morgosmaci 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
- Eridrus 8y agoNot sure how this works specifically, but usually you step back a bit and say that what you actually want to determine is not whether a user performed a transaction, but how many users who saw a specific ad bought a product, and then you develop a (statistical) zero knowledge proof/protocol to achieve this. I don't actually know how to do this, so this is a bit like the "draw the rest of the owl" meme :)
- ggm 8y agoThey've been doing variations of spend track as a $value to goods and services for years (I mean the banks) so.. I don't get it: whats significantly different this time, compared to the spend tracking they've done as business-intelligence for the last 20 years? They sell it to the highest targetted bidder. If you are buying BMW accessories for an old model car, without searching online, dont be surprised if you get ads for mercedes cars with a BMW buy-back: your postcode or ZIPcode, plus a few other details gets "you" as well as fingerprinting web purchase: remember your card is used in a weighted centroid centered on your home...
- draw_down 8y agoI’ve grown very weary of HN comments that just say “what’s new about this?” Things can be worth discussing after the exact moment they become known to the world
- CommanderData 8y agoLong live cash.
- j88439h84 8y agoGNU Taler can't come soon enough. Http://Taler.net > When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed. Just like payments in cash, nobody else can track how you spent your electronic money. However, you obtain a legally valid proof of payment.
- tumetab1 8y agoGNU Taler site like to state that at the same time stating they government will have overview into all transactions. https://taler.net/en/governments.html https://taler.net/en/governments.html I call bullshit in the comparison to cash.
- j88439h84 8y agoThe merchant is identified and the transaction is logged; the customer is anonymous.
- mvpu 8y agoThe 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Skunkleton 8y agoThe 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?
- leereeves 8y agoI'd say the 2016 election proved how hard we are to manipulate. Hillary lost despite spending more and having nearly the entire media (with only a few exceptions like Fox) on her side.
- village-idiot 8y agoIt's hard to say that the media was on her side when they gave billions worth of free coverage to Trump. They also gave her email scandals equal weighting compared to Trump admitting to sexual assault and directly asking a foreign government to hack his opponent on live television.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- leereeves 8y ago
- oh-kumudo 8y agoWithout opt out? How is this even LEGAL???????
- wpdev_63 8y agohttps://getmonero.org/ https://getmonero.org/
- bahmboo 8y ago" 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."
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gboudrias 8y agoAm I the only one who finds this outrageous? I'm not surprised, but I am angry.
- iaml 8y agoThis is hardly the first outrageous thing google has done.
- _ks3e 8y agoCredit card data sharing has been around for a while. Fortunately, financial institutions appear to be marginally less pathological about allowing people to control how their personal data is used than certain large social media companies, and there are opt-outs for pretty much all of the major financial institutions. According to the article, users can also opt out of the tracking on Google's side using Google's privacy controls. However, I think it's probably best to opt out of that data being collected in the first place, since the financial companies are probably selling that data to other companies. Here's the link for Mastercard: https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/about-mastercard/what-we-do/privacy/data-analytics-opt-out.html https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/about-mastercard/what-we-do/... (the language is kind of strange - "To opt-out from our anonymization of your personal information to perform data analyses" - I'm hoping it refers to opting out of sharing your anonymized personal info, not opting out of the anonymization so they can sell your un-anonymized personal info, but someone should confirm this by sending them a letter). Visa users can opt out here: https://usa.visa.com/legal/privacy-policy-opt-out.html https://usa.visa.com/legal/privacy-policy-opt-out.html (actual opt-out page is https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do). Amex seems to be somewhat better about this, saying "We only share your personal data with third parties where it is necessary to provide you with products or services or as part of the nature of our relationship with you, where we have previously informed or been authorized by you, in connection with our efforts to reduce fraud or criminal activity, or as permitted by law." (source: https://www.americanexpress.com/us/content/customer-privacy-principles.html https://www.americanexpress.com/us/content/customer-privacy-...). Whether anonymized data is considered 'personal data' isn't clear, though - the definition given is "any information that relates to an identified or identifiable individual." Whether the "relates to" property persists after anonymization is not specified. It's also worth noting that opting out of data sharing by a credit card network does not limit data sharing by the bank that issues the card - for that, you probably have to contact them separately (Chase, for instance, has a privacy number you need to call to opt out of data sharing https://www.chase.com/digital/resources/privacy-security/questions/policy-information https://www.chase.com/digital/resources/privacy-security/que...).
- trumped 8y agoI thought anyone could already easily buy all this data from any credit card companies...
- ryandvm 8y agoWell, if you're looking for some anti-Google legislation to get traction in the US, there's probably never going to be a more interested President...
- bigiain 8y agoThat'd be some sort of delicious irony. The most reprehensible president ever, curtailing the bad behaviour of the most reprehensible global advertising company ever.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoSlighly off topic, whenever I see rebates (or similar) in the form of gift cards, I always assume the the entity awarding the gift card does so because the use of the card deepens their data profile on you. Or maybe I'm just too paranoid?
- manigandham 8y agoYes, although gift cards are usually limited in where you can spend. It's also an amazing amount of float for larger companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Float_(money_supply) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Float_(money_supply)
- dgzl 8y agoThe thing about paranoia is, it doesn't necessarily make you wrong, but it might make you crazy.
- orbitingpluto 8y agoTracking by credit card is so effective that some companies, such as Safeway (*in Canada), have ceased their loyalty card programs. Loyalty card programs are redundant and must offer incentives for consumers to choose to use them. Now, no such incentives have to be offered to the customer to obtain the same data.
- lawnchair_larry 8y agoSafeway has not ceased their loyalty program.
- dman 8y agoWhy ruin a good story with facts?
- orbitingpluto 8y agoThey did in Canada. (And I've seen articles that say Canadians use cash less often than in the States.)
- electricEmu 8y agoYou've been provided two opportunities to cite those articles.
- orbitingpluto 8y agohttps://globalnews.ca/news/1249484/safeway-discontinues-club-card-loyalty-program/ https://globalnews.ca/news/1249484/safeway-discontinues-club... "You've been provided two opportunities to cite those articles." That is worded in the most irksome manner. What is wrong with you?
- annamargot 8y agoApple is making Google get creative with ad tracking. Safari ITP 2 doesn’t allow 3rd party cookies. https://adexchanger.com/data-exchanges/ding-dong-third-party-cookies-and-fingerprinting-are-officially-dead-in-safari/ https://adexchanger.com/data-exchanges/ding-dong-third-party... https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/09/apple-tracking-block-costs-advertising-companies-millions-dollars-criteo-web-browser-safari https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/09/apple-tra...
- cromwellian 8y agoThere are cryptographic ways to compute a set intersection between two sets A and B held by two different parties without A and B revealing the membership of elements of the set. If set A is the set of users shown ads for Merchant M, and set B is the set of customers at merchant M who purchased something, then this intersection can tell you what percentage of the ads were shown to people who made a purchase without revealing who made the purchase to A or revealing who was shown an ad to B. There’s probably a way to do it with differential privacy as well but it might be less efficient.
- makecheck 8y agoI don’t think this is necessarily new for credit cards...the deal has always been that cards have perks in exchange for them gaining valuable profiling info (e.g. “1% cash back on restaurants!” and in exchange they have a good idea how people spend at restaurants). The problem is, and always has been, that in exchange for some paltry “rewards” you have no idea just who gets sold what, or for how long, etc. And this is a major new problem primarily because of how big and pervasive Google is, and how they’re into every business. This means I’m no longer sharing a few silly restaurant purchases with buyers of that data in the restaurant business, I’m enabling a crazy machine-learned madness that is hyper-connected to literally everything else I do. This should be illegal but our laws are too slow to catch up with powerful tech.
- cromwellian 8y agoThere are cryptographic ways to compute a set intersection between two sets A and B held by two different parties without A and B revealing the membership of elements of the set. If set A is the set of users shown ads for Merchant M, and set B is the set of customers at merchant M who purchased something, then this intersection can tell you what percentage of the ads were shown to people who made a purchase without revealing who made the purchase to A or revealing who was shown an ad to B. There’s probably a way to do it with differential privacy as well but it might be less efficient. This is like the fourth time this story has hit the media. Google really needs to publish the full transparent details of their protocol and let the academic community analyze the, if only to avoid misinformation and speculation.
- zerealshadowban 8y agoI've been repeatedly contacted by Google over recent years (supposedly because of the work I've done) but I've always felt uneasy about them and hesitated to respond. This additional layer of tracking and the recent revelation on location tracking regardless of explicit settings both seal the non-deal for me. The soul of that company is to turn the human experience into a vessel for the paid delivery of ads, nothing else matters. Of course I'm sure that one can join many interesting engineering projects there, with suitable blinders. Even when they introduced their AR glasses, they had to show virtual billboards assaulting one's field of vision. What you are to Google is a recipient for ad delivery -- not a customer, not a respected human, not someone to trade with.
- eitally 8y agoFWIW, the Ads org is about 8000 employees (not counting sales), out of 80000 total at Google. Cloud is about 25000 (of which about 4000 are sales and supporting GTM functions). There's MUCH more going on at Google than ads... and that doesn't count the enormous teams working on things like Android, Chrome, Maps, and Youtube.
- Rafuino 8y agoUhh... ultimately Android, Chrome, Maps, and Youtube are all about siphoning more data on you and delivering more ads
- justincormack 8y ago85% of revenue is directly attributable to advertising. Its an ad company that would like not to be.
- Paul-ish 8y agoIs there a privacy focused credit card?
- GuB-42 8y agoPre-paid debit cards.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoGoogle finally cracks the affiliate nut :-) This was pretty killer for me: Google paid Mastercard millions of dollars for the data, according to two people who worked on the deal, and the companies discussed sharing a portion of the ad revenue, according to one of the people. That is not an unusual arrangement for people with search indexes, party A provides a search query, party B provides 10 links to appropriate content and some advertisements, if the eyeball making the search clicks on an ad the revenue is split between in the index provider (party B) and the traffic provider (party A).
- tokyodude 8y agoIs there are opportunity for a non-tracked credit card? Would it even be possible? I don't mean anonymous, I just mean "We promise not to share your data period, not even anonymized" but we still have your name and address and phone number on your account. But even if some company offered that all the retailers could still share their data with some aggregator which would effective work around your privacy oriented card not sharing data. I'd love not to be tracked and would switch cards immediately if they offered the same services I get now and offered zero tracking. I suspect I'm in the minority but maybe with the right PR blitz you could get regular people to switch. "Does your credit card spy on you? Do they sell all your purchase data to advertisers so they can target you with ads? Yes? Welcome to 'PrivacyCard'" or something Next YC batch?
- HohPum1l 8y ago> But even if some company offered that all the retailers could still share their data with some aggregator which would effective work around your privacy oriented card not sharing data. If you buy in a brick and mortar store the retailer would not have your address, only your card number. And a privacy-focusd CC company would allow you to generate new numbers for each transaction so the retailers can't use that to merge datasets.
- foepys 8y agoFunnily enough, Google Pay (and Apple Pay even earlier) is doing exactly that [1]. The merchant is only seeing a token that will be connected to the actual card number in the credit card network. Google is now closing the circle to get to know exactly what was bought - blowing all privacy advantages away. 1: https://support.google.com/pay/merchants/answer/6345242?hl=en https://support.google.com/pay/merchants/answer/6345242?hl=e...
- basicplus2 8y agoAnd removing the oportunity for the retailer to collect info on who shops in their stores...
- crb002 8y agoThey are going to use the results to set up a hedge fund. Not quite insider trading, but shady.
- justfor1comment 8y agoGoogle: free, credit card: 20% APR, human right to privacy: priceless. There are some things money can't buy, for everything else there's Mastercard.
- rathish_g 8y agoI am lost? How will they track a sale with the credit card data? Without the store's invoice data, how can they link credit card transaction it back to a product?
- lotsofpulp 8y agoThey will have the store's invoice data. https://blog.bluepay.com/what-is-level-3-payment-processing https://blog.bluepay.com/what-is-level-3-payment-processing If I buy from Staples.com using Amex, my Amex statement comes with an itemized list of what I purchased. Also seen some gas stations do it. If whatever you're doing is digital, assume it's online and everyone has access to the data.
- reacharavindh 8y agoThis is precisely why "going cashless" is silly. At least leave the option to those citizens that care about their privacy to be able to pay with cash and not be tracked the heck out of them.
- eyeareque 8y agoSure you can pay with cash. But you better turn off your phone because they also track you with your WiFi MAC address when you walk into stores.
- Jonnax 8y agoYour phone should randomise the Mac when searching for access points.
- throwawayperson 8y agoThat's where IOS did much better.
- reacharavindh 8y agoDoes iOS randomize MAC addresses when looking for public wifi networks? Another thing to worry about is whether iPhone really turns off the wifi radio when it is greeted out from the menu.. I remember a setting change somewhere around ios10/11..
- throwawayperson 8y agoiOS 8 MAC address randomization
- TheRealDunkirk 8y agoAnd going all-cash, at this point, is futile. It's the same as the Google email or the Facebook profile conundrums. You can opt out, but they have enough context to infer most everything about your "hole" in their data anyway.
- throw2016 8y agoData was always subject to different rules in different regions. Collation and correlation has a multiplier effect. With negative repercussions for privacy, dissent and democracy. The whole approach of of trying to 'normalize' surveillance is questionable. Since this is a discussion forum for individuals how does this benefit the individual? It reeks of hand waving and apologism. Some people are making money from being creepy and polluting the commons. This is no different from polluting the environment you exist in that sustains you for personal benefit. We now recognize and do not allow that kind of destructive greed. How is invasive surveillance any different?
- Tehnix 8y agoI wonder how this interacts with GDPR? Could I send a mail to VISA, asking what information they are tracking on me? Or is it “okay” because it’s anonymized?
- tumetab1 8y agoYou can always ask for what information is gathered on you. Please do and share a blog on it :)
- amarant 8y agoprivacy concerns aside, does this mean I finally won't get ads for stuff I recently bought anymore? i seem to be getting a lot of "you recently bought a new camera of model xyz, would you like to buy another one?" if they instead recomended memorycards or compatible lenses, that would be a better experience. regarding privacy I've pretty much come to accept that I don't have any. This acceptance has been a great boon to my psychological health :)
- TheRealDunkirk 8y agohttps://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/ https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/ McNealy knew, in 1999, what was happening, because he was selling the first commoditized computers to be used for world-wide-scale tracking of user data to the government.
- bopbop 8y agoPossibly off-topic but it's so sad that the greatest minds of our generation, the previous generation, and the next are all working out how to maximize digital profiling to more accurately sell us things. Second only to this is the creepy fact that tools like Deepmind are being built with the purpose of furthering these goals - all of the chess/go beating is literally a side line. I think this is why people like Elon Musk - he may have some socially reprehensible behaviours, but at least his end goals are either benign or helpful to humanity.
- codedokode 8y agoThat's how you become a product when there is no proper regulation. > Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users > We do not have access to any personal information from our partners’ credit and debit cards, nor do we share any personal information with our partners That probably means that they do not get customers' names or email addresses but hashes of them. So technically no personal information is transferred.
- icco 8y agoIf you don't want to be tracked, only pay cash and in person. Otherwise, assume everyone is doing stuff like this and has been your entire life.
- tessi3r 8y agoWow, this is disgusting. I still can't believe how limited my options with Visa and BofA were to opt out of data mining...