The significance of this is immense. No longer will advertisers have to wonder how much revenue can be tied to a specific campaign, instead the Store Sales Management will give them insight into how actual consumers who viewed advertisements purchased certain products.
This complaint concerns "Store Sales Measurement," a consumer profiling technique pursued by the world's largest Internet company to track consumers who make offline purchases. Google has collected billions of credit card transactions, containing personal customer information, from credit card companies, data brokers, and others and has linked those records with the activities of Internet users, including product searches and location searches. This data reveals sensitive information about consumer purchases, health, and private lives. According to Google, it can track about 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States.
Additionally Google stated that it only learns the "aggregate value" of several purchases, not individual ones, and that neither it nor the ad buyer knows where the individual clicks came from.
Consider privacy from the start. Google's statement emphasizes that it invested in privacy protections from the beginning, and considered measures like encryption and aggregation.
Understand internally what data streams are being accessed and related. Often, companies do not know what data they are taking in until there is an issue. Considering exactly what is occurring at the leadership level will enable faster and more accurate responses in situations like Google's.
Be prepared to discuss what data the service exposes to third parties. Here, Google has already said that the purchases are exposed via an aggregate value and not linked to individual clicks. Companies would be wise to consider how they would explain these issues to individuals who are being tracked as well as interested parties such as EPIC, and potentially the FTC, in advance.