Just A Research Project or a New Spying Network Linking Adverts To Purchases?

Marketing departments have long spent money of advertising campaigns and where they must assess the benefit of the campaign. It might relate to increased sales of a product, or improved brand awareness. The time it takes to assess these campaigns is often lengthy using traditional media based advertisements. But on-line affiliate marketing takes Google searches of users, and then places advertisements on web pages. In this way a user can be tracked for their click on an advertisement and then through to the purchase. With this there is a fee for a pay-for-click and a pay-for-purchase, and where the pay-for-purchase will have a much higher fee, as the person has actually purchased something.

But a weakness in the on-line system is that someone could view a Ford car on-line, and then the next week go and buy one. This loop has now been closed with Google being reported to actually purchasing Mastercard credit card data in the US [here]. At present Mastercard is denying that its data is actually used for identifying purchases.

While the data is encrypted using double blind encryption — to provide anonymity at each of the stages of identifying customers — it does lay open serious privacy issues. Google say the focus is on research on how on-line advertising affects purchases, and that users…