GOOGLE EYES SPENDING PATTERNS
san francisco» Google already monitors online shopping — and now it’s keeping an eye on physical stores to try to sell more digital advertising.
The internet company said Tuesday that a new tool will track how much money people spend in merchants’ brick-and-mortar stores after clicking on their digital ads.
The analysis will be done by matching the combined ad clicks of people who are logged into Google services with their collective purchases on credit and debit cards. Google says it won’t be able to examine the specific items purchased or how much a specific individual spent.
But even aggregated data can sometimes be converted back to data that can identify individuals, said Larry Ponemon, chairman of Ponemon Institute, a privacy research firm.
Target, states reach agreement •
new york»New York’s attorney general is announcing that 47 states and the District of Columbia have reached an $18.5 million settlement with Target Corp. to resolve the states’ probe into the discounter’s massive pre-Christmas data breach in 2013.
Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman’s office says the agreement announced Tuesday is the largest multistate data breach settlement to date.
Fox News falls out of first •
new york» Fox News Channel has found itself somewhere it has rarely been the past decade — out of first place.
The network’s weekday prime-time lineup, long the king of cable news, finished behind MSNBC in viewers last week, the Nielsen company said. Among the 25-to-54-yearold audience that advertisers pay a premium for, Fox finished third to MSNBC and CNN for the first time in 17 years.
It was uniquely bad timing for Fox, a week filled with late-breaking news unflattering to President Donald Trump, who much of the network’s audience supports. But it also comes shortly after the firing of star anchor Bill O’Reilly, as Fox is trying to establish a new prime-time lineup.
Nokia settles with Apple
• helsinki Nokia and Apple have settled their numerous legal disputes after signing an agreement to work together.
Nokia, once the world’s No. 1 cellphone maker and now a networks provider after selling its ailing mobile phone sector to Microsoft in 2014, described the pact as “meaningful.”
Judge backs worker in medical marijuana case
• providence, r.i. » A judge has ruled against a Rhode Island textile company accused of discriminating against a woman when she was denied an internship because she uses medical marijuana to treat migraine headaches.
The Superior Court judge’s decision released Tuesday found that the Westerly-based Darlington Fabrics Corp. had violated the state’s Hawkins-Slater Medical Marijuana Act, which prevents discrimination against card-carrying medical marijuana users.
The complaint said Christine Callaghan, who was a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island, negotiated a paid internship with Darlington Fabrics in 2014 but lost it after disclosing she held a medical marijuana card.