A new scandal involving Google has the company secretly providing select advertisers with a “stock” of credit card transaction data.
After a four-year negotiation, Google and Mastercard reached an agreement in which Google would pay millions of dollars in exchange for providing data from cardholders, according to a report . Google then “packaged” the data into a new tool called Store Sales Measurement. 
The tool allows the company’s customers to track how many of their online ads actually convert into sales.
So far, so good, except that neither company has informed its users about this setting. For Mastercard, this means that most of its two billion customers are unaware that they are being tracked.
“People don’t expect that what they buy in a physical store can be linked to what they buy online,” Christine Bannan, a consultant at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Bloomberg. “There’s an overwhelming amount of data that companies are taking from consumers and not taking responsibility for informing users about what they’re doing and what their rights are.”
Last year, when Google first announced its Store Sales Measurement service, it claimed to have access to “about 70 percent” of U.S. credit and debit cards. Mastercard-branded purchases account for about 25 percent of all credit card transactions in the U.S., according to financial research firm Nilson Report.
While Google did not name its partners, the 70 percent it said it serves suggests that Mastercard is not the only credit card company it works with.
Visa and American Express did not respond to requests for comment.
A Google spokesperson told TNW:
Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from seeing your personal information. We don’t have access to your personal information from your credit or debit cards. We don’t share your personal information with our partners. Google users can turn off Web and App Activity controls at any time.
While users have the option to turn off offline tracking, most people aren’t aware that it exists, and ’s opt-out tool doesn’t mention anything about offline purchase tracking.
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