As soon as the company announced the ability to advertisers it became a major story among the popular media, from the LA Times to the Washington Post. That’s the conundrum Google has faced with its purchase tracking software: how does it get the word out about what it can do, without getting the word out about what it can do? It turns out that Google has spent years building the ultimate system for tracking people’s purchases virtually wherever they go, allowing ads to be perfectly targeted to each person’s individual habits - but what good does that do for Google, if it can’t mention that fact to the people buying the ads, aka, the public? On the one hand, its whole business is selling advertising space and, sensibly, it wants the people buying that space to know its true value, so they’ll pay the most for it. Since 2014, that’s over 5 billion transactions. Google claimed that between new partnerships and a “revolutionary” MIT-inspired approach to data modeling, it can scrape and analyze up to 70 percent of all credit and debit card transactions across America. giant made the revelation on its blog Tuesday. Google is facing scrutiny in the wake of the announcement that it has near-omniscience in tracking the purchases of Americans.

Credit cards on google