Google reportedly bought Mastercard data to link online ads with offline purchases

If you’re a Mastercard holder in the US, Google has reportedly been tracking whether you are influenced by online ads in your offline purchases for the past year. That’s thanks to a private deal between the two companies brokered after four years of negotiation, according to a Bloomberg report published today.

Neither Google nor Mastercard have publicly announced the partnership, and neither company let its customers know that their offline purchases are being tracked through Mastercard purchase histories and correlated with online ad interactions. Google reportedly paid Mastercard millions of dollars for data on what people have been buying. It used that data to build a tool for advertisers that would break down whether people who had…

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