Which is why it would be reasonable to write an article about those things (with evidence). The article linked here is pointing to completely normal and desirable behavior and seems to hope readers won't notice.

> Bear in mind, these companies know which ads they've shown you and when, for example, and at least in one case, buys your credit card transaction history to compare your purchases with the ads you've seen.

Correct me if I am wrong but are you saying one of these two companies buys people's credit card transaction history and then compares people's ad history against the transaction history? If yes, that sounds really incredible.

Straight from the horse's mouth: https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-anal...

"And even if your business doesn’t have a large loyalty program, you can still measure store sales by taking advantage of Google’s third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States."

IIRC, this was announced as part of a program that uses double-blinded crypto that allows google to perform matching against this data in aggregate (Set intersection knowledge), but not individually identity of what a given user purchased, at the same time preventing the merchants from learning the identities of individuals either.

According to what they presented at a crypto conference, they went to great pains to avoid capturing personally identifiable transactions. The overall strategy is that Google Knows = Set A = (all ads shown for user X at Merchant Y) Merchant/Credit Card Proccessor Knows = Set B = (all $$$ paid by User X at Merchant Y), and that it is possible to cryptographically compute sum($$$ of A intersect B) without either side learning Set(User X).

Now whether you believe in the security of the algorithm and whether there are side channel leaks or attacks is another issue.

Edit: http://bristolcrypto.blogspot.com/2017/01/rwc-2017-secure-mp...

About 10 minutes in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee7oRsDnNNc

Yes, this was in the news a few times.

Yes, both Google and Facebook do exactly that.

Very much this. I downloaded my data from Facebook last week, and as you say, it's just stuff I have shared and not any of the tracking/profile stuff. Can't say I was surprised at all.

Right before deleting my account, I also downloaded my data. The most illuminating thing I discovered that there were several advertisers that 'had my contact info' that I had never dealt with in any way (as far as I know), including lots of political groups from all over the country, even though I made a point to never engage in or post anything even remotely political when I had an active account.

Could you please provide some examples of data that Google has on you that isn't available in Takeout?

(I'm interpreting "has on you" as meaning "not anonymized.")

There's a ton of it. This should be beyond obvious. The purpose of Takeout is to let you retrieve all the data that you have uploaded to G. You can take this data and then, perhaps, move to a competitor or even good your search engine. None of this includes or precludes the sophisticated analytics and surveillance that G performs to enrich and value-add this data. That is proprietary secret sauce stuff.

This article is just dumb clickbait. It's too bad the conversation is now being driven by rank nonsense. G, Jolie Facebook, does not sell data or profiles of you to third parties. That is what people should be focused on as a first step, the buying and selling of data.

I provided an example in the comment already, and in a child comment, I've now linked to a Google source where they state the data they are getting. And of course, to connect the credit card data they are buying with the Google accounts they are showing ads to, they have to be able to associate a given credit card transaction with a given Google user account.

Indeed. They have lots more data about you that they don't consider to be your data. They think it is their data.

I wonder if they store more than that, heatmaps, and such