PrefBlog

Well, we’re moving closer to a surveillance society:

For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the U.S. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for.

But most of the two billion Mastercard holders aren’t aware of this behind-the-scenes tracking. That’s because the companies never told the public about the arrangement.

I’ve been assuming this was happening already, so I’ve been using my credit cards sparingly for the past while. I’ve recently started using DuckDuckGo as my search engine … it has one of world’s stupider names, but they did attract $10-million in OMERS-led financing:

The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System is leading a US$10-million investment in the profitable U.S. firm, which handles about 24 million searches a day and generates more than US$25-million in annual revenue. DuckDuckGo has steadily grown following a rash of disclosures in recent years about how much personal data is harvested online and used by Google, Facebook and the U.S. National Security Agency.

It’s a small but symbolic investment by the pension giant. OMERS Ventures, the pension plan’s venture capital arm, recently stated it believes emerging blockchain technologies will empower a “decentralized web” where users will regain greater control over their own data, potentially disrupting the business models of internet giants that extensively collect and mine user information.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2018 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.