FTC Complaint Filed Over Google’s Store Sales Measurement Technology ⇥ washingtonpost.com

Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg, Washington Post:

A prominent privacy rights watchdog is asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate a new Google advertising program that ties consumers’ online behavior to their purchases in brick-and-mortar stores.

The legal complaint from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, to be filed with the FTC on Monday, alleges that Google is newly gaining access to a trove of highly sensitive information — the credit and debit card purchase records of the majority of U.S. consumers — without revealing how they got the information or giving consumers meaningful ways to opt out. Moreover, the group claims that the search giant is relying on a secretive technical method to protect the data — a method that should be audited by outsiders and is likely vulnerable to hacks or other data breaches.

While Google may be one of the most well-known companies to broker and use data that would normally be considered private, they’re certainly not the only ones from which it is difficult or impossible to opt-out.