Google collects and analyzes data on purchases of users of Android Pay offline

Photo: NTV



This year, as usual, Google held a marketing conference where it announced several new tools offered to advertisers. One of them provides an opportunity to receive information about offline purchases of users of the Android Pay system. Thus, companies can track the effectiveness of advertising their products / services, receiving information about the dynamics of purchases of various users. This is important for a business, because marketing costs money, often a lot of money. Representatives of various companies want to optimize their costs, and the offline sector used to be difficult to track.



Now a business can evaluate, for example, the real “exhaust” from advertising on TV, billboards, radio, etc. In the usual case, it is also possible to determine the effectiveness of such methods, but they are all very inaccurate. In the digital era, marketers were able to carry out advertising campaigns and in the network, and here everything is already amenable to analysis. But in the real, not virtual world, until recently, everything remained the same. But now Google allows to correct this omission, and to enable businesses to analyze the sales and behavior of the target audience, however, only that part of it that uses Android Pay.



Now an advertiser can understand that yes, John Smith saw an advertisement for a coffee shop that was advertised yesterday, and yes, he liked a special form of cane sugar, which he paid for using the Google payment system. Great, you can please the owner of the coffee shop with good news.



In principle, offline analytics is not the first experience for Google. Back in 2014, the corporation announced a new tool that allows you to track the number of visitors with Android smartphones in the stores of a company that advertises something, linking the dynamics of visits with the effectiveness of the advertised. Attendance of individual points is, of course, good, but it’s impossible to find out the average bill or even fix the fact of purchase in this way. Therefore, a new tool was needed to collect the missing data for this method. And this tool has become the Android Pay program.



“In the next few months, we will provide the opportunity to track purchases in stores at the campaign level. This will allow you to measure the size of the income point, in addition to tracking its attendance, “- said in a statement from Google. In fact, this means the ability to track purchases with reference to the user, who previously showed ads with the goods they bought.







Now Google is able to track 70% of purchases on credit and debit cards in the United States. The company's tools allow advertisers to follow the dynamics of consumer interests and consumer behavior of individual users. Of course, the name of the person in this case will not be indicated, Google separately told about the anonymization of data. But each customer will be assigned an identification code like 08a862b091c379fe9767615d10873. By this code it will be possible to see that this particular person watched several advertising videos of a store, and in the afternoon went and bought an advertised product in this store.



Is it possible to call it anonymity? Probably yes. But the line between anonymity and deanonymization of customers is already very thin. Earlier studies have shown that identifying a user for a transaction using a credit card is easy . In addition, the user can be identified by the applications he uses.



And no one will guarantee that at some fine moment the data with user IDs will not leak into the network. Further, it will be quite simple to identify a specific person. Well, if you remember that in the shops of the buyer, they often ask to indicate their email (while Google will track the purchase itself), the task is even more simplified. And all this is tied not only to Adnroid Pay, but also to the user's credit card. That is, we are talking about a huge database for each customer, which is stored “somewhere there”, and no one knows what they are doing with this data.

Now - and in Russia

May 23 Android Pay service has earned in Russia. In order to take advantage of this opportunity, you need to add the data of your bank card to the application on your Android phone, and then pay with the device, attaching it to the terminal.





True, the system started with problems. Initially, Android Pay was supposed to earn on May 16, but something went wrong, and the launch was made on May 23.



This “not so” continued after launch. Some users reported that payment using the system is not made, despite the addition of a card from a Russian bank.





Well, most Chinese smartphones could not work with Android Pay at all, when trying to install an application, it was reported that "Android Pay is not supported on this device." If the phone is rooted, there can also be similar problems.



Plus, to work with Android Pay, you must enter your home address and specify a zip code. But the problem is that sometimes the system does not accept the correct index, so you have to enter the indices of other cities, for example, from Moscow or Leningrad regions.