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The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/05/23/google-now-knows-when-you-are-at-a-cash-register-and-how-much-you-are-spending/ reports that Google has talked retailers into sharing data from credit card transactions, which it will link to location and other data, to further enhance consumer profiling*.
The article says "Google for years has been mining location data from Google Maps in an effort to prove that knowledge of people's physical locations could "close the loop" between physical and digital worlds. Users can block this by adjusting the settings on smartphones, but few do so, say privacy experts.
This location tracking ability has allowed Google to send reports to retailers telling them, for example, whether people who saw an ad for a lawn mower later visited or passed by a Home Depot. The location-tracking program has grown since it was first launched with only a handful of retailers. Home Depot, Express, Nissan, and Sephora have participated."
* and erode privacy.
The article also makes it clear than consumers don't get to opt-out, if they even find out their data has been shared.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @07:22PM
Bingo!
The easiest marks are the people who think they are immune to the con because they don't think they need to protect against the con.
Targeted marketing is not about connecting people with products that they already want. Its about manipulating them into buying the products the marketer has been paid to push on them.
If you are just a regular consumer Its easy to think advertising doesn't work, because most of the time it does not. A 5% response rate is considered an overwhelming success in the advertising world. So 95% of the time the
manipulationadvertising does not work, but 5% of the time it does. If you aren't actively taking countermeasures, you will be that 5% sooner or later.