Google's selected advertisers have had a hidden access to trace one's purchases do through Mastercard. The latest tip suggested that a number of advertisers were given the priority to check whether the products that they portray through ads are bought or not by the users, through a track record of the purchases done by them using their Mastercards. The advertisers even able to keep the track of their bills of retail stores.
According to a report by Bloomberg, Google had a secret deal with Mastercard, which allegedly allowed the former partner sellers and advertisers to keep an eye over the purchases of the customers done through their Mastercard labeled credit & debit cards. This allowed the sellers and the advertisers to run ads as assumed by a customer's previous choice and simultaneously trick & attract him to buy the products, as a hyper online marketing tool. The insight was reportedly revealed and confirmed by three different persons, who were directly associated with this operation.
One of the three insiders of this deal stated that Google used to pay Mastercard millions of dollars for the data. Also, the companies discussed sharing a portion of the ad revenue as reported by one of them to Chicago Tribune. However, a Google spokeswoman denied all such allegations. She didn't spare a word on the terms of Google's partnership with Mastercard. She added that Google never shared its ad revenues to any financial giants for providing them any unethical favors.
Google authorities stated on this: "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," "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." Google even stated that users who are not interested to see the adds can opt out at any point of time using "Web and App Activity."
Mastercard spokesman Set Eisen also declined to talk on such claims of partnership with Google. He stated in this regard: "We do not provide insights that track, serve up ads to, or even measure ad effectiveness relating to, individual consumers."
He added that Mastercard only shares broadly accumulated transaction data with merchants and their service providers to help them measure "the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns." "No individual transaction or personal data is provided," to any of the beneficiary partners of the company.
