MIT Technology Review – Google Now Tracks Your Credit Card Purchases and Connects Them to Its Online Profile of You: “Google’s new ability to match people’s offline credit card purchases to their online lives is a stunning display of surveillance capitalism in action. The capability, which Google unveiled [the week of May 22, 2017], allows the company to connect the dots between the ads that it shows its users and what they end up actually buying. This is a crucial link for Google’s business that, for all of the company’s inventiveness, remains a matter of attracting users to its predominantly free services, collecting user data, and leveraging that data to sell advertising. If Google can show that someone who saw an ad for a furniture store in Google Maps, say, then went and made a big purchase at that store, the store’s owner is much more likely to run more ads…”