Google has ad surprise in stores

GOOGLE is tracking you right into a store, even if you aren’t using its Maps app.

The $1 trillion tech behemoth gloats of its cyberstalking capability in a blog post promoting its “Store Visits” marketing measurement service, in which it claims “99 per cent accuracy” in telling if a person went into any of 200 million physical shops after seeing an online ad.

“Only Google can deliver this level of precision and scale,” Google says in the Inside Adwords blog.

While a user must opt-in to share their location history, Google encourages this in the set-up of many applications, for example by saying that doing so will create a useful “private map”.

However, the information is then used to feed the Store Visits machine for marketers.

University of Sydney media and communications department chair Tim Dwyer said the typical consumer wouldn’t realise the extent to which their personal information was being traded away.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is investigating the “impact of information asymmetry” between Google and advertisers on one hand and consumers on the other.

Data experts Oracle claim Google collects masses of additional location data from phones that don’t have web services or apps open. The data is allegedly transmitted even if there’s no SIM card, sent via little-known “activity logs”.

Google calls these logs “location services”, which is different to location history and opt-out, not opt-in. Google claim location services data isn’t shared outside the firm. Oracle says activity logs chew up on average one gigabyte of a user’s mobile plan data each month.