What makes you think MC and Google aren't doing the same thing in Europe?

If they do, I hope they get caught and have to pay 4% of their global revenue under GDPR.

There are laws against them doing this in Europe.

Are you referring to GDPR? As far as I can tell, the data is allegedly anonymous, so not subject to GDPR. Even if it weren't, Google doesn't exactly have a good track record of respecting privacy or privacy related laws. They've been known to "accidentally" harvest wifi traffic in bulk. They drive spy cars around taking pictures or everything and everyone.

If they were anonymous Google wouldn't be able to match purchases against ad views or let users opt out. I suppose they are just exchanging something like a hash from customer data, so technically Google doesn't get personal information.

The first GDPR suits against Google will be interesting. Nobody knows yet exactly what is banned under the GDPR.

Bloody nanny state socialists and their business destroying government overreach. No wonder they'll never catch up with Silicon Valley. /s

This is about linking real-world credit-card payments to your online identity. People in Europe don't use credit cards offline.

>People in Europe don't use credit cards offline.

That's a huge over-generalization. It's true that cash is king in Germany for instance, but Scandinavians pay almost exclusively by card.

> It's true that cash is king in Germany for instance,

Sure, Germany is a bit behind the times when it comes to paying with plastic.

> but Scandinavians pay almost exclusively by card

Same goes for the Netherlands where I live, but we don't pay by credit card, we pay by debit card.

To clarify, in US even debit cards are primarily Visa or Mastercard, whereas in Europe they're not. E.g. Norway uses BankAxept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankAxept

And in Sweden we use Mastercard and Visa.

Danish person here. We mostly pay by Dankort, which is the standard national debit card, I would bet more than 99% of card payments here are direct debit.

And with Dankort, you have the additional pleasure of being spied on by tabloid news papers.

> People in Europe don't use credit cards offline.

What? Of course we do. If anything, Europeans are less likely to use credit cards online (though that is slowly changing), instead opting for bank transfers or online debit cards.