Google, Mastercard together have been up to some behind-the-scene tracking: Report

Let’s raise this questions once again. How much control do we really have on our personal data? How far the reservation have tech companies gone in data tracking? Why does a consumer carry so much burden, when companies don’t take enough responsibility for the data they take from us? According to a report by Bloomberg, **Google** and **Mastercard** have been working together in a secret deal for months now, which is apparently aimed to help Google in ad tracking. While Google has refused to comment on these claims, the report suggests that the company has apparently paid Mastercard millions of dollars for measuring retail spending, and tracking how users’ offline spendings are linked to what they are buying online. [caption id=“attachment_5086541” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]  Representational image. Creative credit: Tech2/Nandini Yadav[/caption] This has naturally raised privacy concerns about how much consumer data technology companies like Google quietly absorb! Microsoft on the other hand says that the company shares transaction trends with merchants and their service providers to help them measure “the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns.” “The information, which includes sales volumes and average size of the purchase, is shared only with permission of the merchants. We do not provide insights that track, serve up ads to, or even measure ad effectiveness relating to, individual consumers.” Seth Eisen, a Mastercard spokesman told Bloomberg. Google too apparently says that “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.” The company further told the publication that users can anytime opt out of ad tracking using Google’s “Web and App Activity” console. However, the real issue here is two folds — a user can turn off ad tracking only if they are aware such a monitoring is being done by the company (because Google has never formally announced about this), two the console does not have a more obvious way for cardholders to opt out of the tracking.