Match Retail Search via Card Transactions

Remember discussing how such a thing could be done, and how the approach could bring along lots of additional information.  Probably a privacy violation, we concluded it was not possible.  But then again Amazon now has a Prime Card,  which is busily racking up purchasing data.   See much more below.

Google and Mastercard cut a secret deal to track retail sales data      By Mark Bergen and Jennifer Surane  in Information Management 

(Bloomberg) -- For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the U.S. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for.

But most of the two billion Mastercard holders aren’t aware of this behind-the-scenes tracking. That’s because the companies never told the public about the arrangement.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Mastercard Inc. brokered a business partnership during about four years of negotiations, according to four people with knowledge of the deal, three of whom worked on it directly. The alliance gave Google an unprecedented asset for measuring retail spending, part of the search giant’s strategy to fortify its primary business against onslaughts from Amazon.com Inc. and others.

But the deal, which has not been previously reported, could raise broader privacy concerns about how much consumer data technology companies like Google quietly absorb...."