Google could be beta testing programme to track where you go offline

Google is reportedly beta testing a programme that involves the company constantly tracking your smartphone’s location to determine when you’ve been visiting stores. The company will be able to correlate store visits to items being searched on the same device to prove that mobile advertisements are indeed effective on its platform.

A report on Digiday has said that this reported beta programme will involve Google tracking consumer’s phone locations all the time, even when a Google application is not being used on it. The exercise is being carried out for the benefit of advertisers.

Searching for you

The programme will work towards establishing a connect between search and actual store visits. For example, if you’ve searched for locations or retailers around you who sell cat food, you will also be showed some advertisements. Say, then you do step out of home and buy a packet of cat food, Google will be able to see if you did indeed visit a store for which you had an ad flash on your smartphone screen. This, in turn, helps Google show advertisers effectiveness.

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The programme could work equally well for Google on Android as well as iOS applications by making use of data collected from Google Search, Gmail, Chrome and Google Maps. The source says that Google’s ability to make the connection between searches and physical store visits is affected by users opting in for location services on their phones – especially on Android – thereby subjecting themselves to being monitoring completely.

Clearly, privacy activists are not amused with this news and believe that users are innocuously tricked into being monitored thanks to lack of clear communication on the part of app makers. Dan Auerbach, Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said, “The disclosure mechanism for these apps are pretty weak. I think there’s a gap between user expectations and what apps are really doing.”

Of course, it’s easier for Google to pull the tracking card on Android devices, since it has passive location tracking on the phone, but Google applications on iOS too aid this tracking. The company had apparently hinted at this programme in a blog post put up early in October but it was mentioned pretty vaguely. Calling something of this sort “cross device conversion,” Google showed an example of online shopping in the post, as opposed to physical store purchases. “Over time, we’ll be adding other conversion types like phone calls and store visits as well as conversions from ads on our search and display network,” Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP of Ads and Commerce for Google wrote.