Google and Mastercard are secretly tracking your offline purchases

Google has quietly been providing select advertisers a “stockpile” of offline credit card transaction data. After a four year negotiation, Google and Mastercard reached a deal that would pay the latter millions in exchange for coughing up data on its card holders, according to a Bloomberg report. Google then packaged the data into a new tool, called Store Sales Measurement, that allowed its customers to track whether online ads turned into real world retail sales. Neither company in