Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal privacy complaint

Re:Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal p... by ocdtrekkie on Monday July 31, 2017 @01:24PM (#14894034)

My question is... how is that supposed to work? How do they turn "person A's credit card account" and "person A's Google account" into something comparable. To say "X customers saw the ad and then purchased it", you've gotta be able to be able to confirm that the same person is on both sides of the dataset, which is a pretty hard problem even without it allegedly not sharing the info on one side with Google.

I guess this complaint from this article is asking the FTC to get more information on this process, or get Google to explain how it works, or something.

Upvote for the explanation.

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Re:Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal p... by sloppycee on Monday July 31, 2017 @03:55PM (#14895366)

You can use geography, I assume this is meant to measure ROAS.

I've worked on a similar problem, and some very large retailers we worked with wanted to measure ROAS. They turned off all adspend in a certain large metropolitan area, while we turned on in that area. Measuring the sales lift/drop, gave an idea of the platform's effectiveness.

Any other demographic data point could also be used, not just geo. You don't necessarily need to link people directly.

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Re:Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal p... by singron on Monday July 31, 2017 @07:59PM (#14896888)

I don't know in this case, but there are several identifiers that both parties might have (phone number, email address, billing address, name). In the industry, you can sometimes get "anonymized" data that is keyed by a hash of these identifiers, then you can hash your own identifiers and join to deanonymize. This isn't how it works in this case, but I know other companies do this.

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Re:Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal p... by UncleMeat on Monday July 31, 2017 @04:35PM (#14895674)

Homomorphic encryption to do set intersection. With sufficiently large sets, you don't need to do any sort of collection at the individual level.

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