Google to track your online spendings

Google has unveiled its plans to help advertisers track their spendings by tracking your credit/debit card spendings. The company will allow advertisers to see whether online ad campaigns generate offline sales. Google said that it captures around 70 percent of credit and debit card transactions in the US.

According to reports by BBC, Google says that Google Attribution makes it possible for every marketer to measure the impact of their marketing across devices and cross-channel - all in one place. The software giant already pulls up data from consumers on the web through Adwords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick advertisements.

Under their new plans, the company will also pull up data from mobile platforms as well and track them later so as to let advertisers know whether their efforts had any influence on the target consumer or not.

However, this raises a serious concern regarding privacy issues. Although Google says that they “will not have access to the details about what individuals spend” and rather learn the value of all purchases in a certain time period, it still violates someone’s privacy. The idea of tracking even a part of someone’s expenditures and then secretly passing it to advertisers violates the privacy of a user. This comes at a time when users are more concerned about their data privacy than anything else. Let’s hope that Google reconsiders this idea and thinks more about the user instead of marketers.

(Source)