Google is without doubt one of the most influential companies in the world. As far as the internet is concerned, there is no other company that wields as much clout. Ad sales is one of the biggest revenue generators for the company and in a new audacious move, Google is going to monitor Credit And Debit card activities from now on. It is an effort to find out how many ad clicks online actually transform into sales in real life.

A new frontier altogether

Google earns hundreds of millions of dollars a year in online advertising revenue and as internet usage increases in developing nations, that revenues is only going to rise.

However, the company now wants to go on a different tangent altogether by correlating real life purchases with ad clicks. To that end, they now plan to monitor debit and Credit Card purchases. A positive correlation means Google would be able to generate even higher amounts of revenue through advertising sales. The campaign is known as Google Attribution and with its help, advertisers who use Google would be able to see the magnitude of sales that are being generated offline through online advertising. In a blog post, Google stated, "For the first time, Google Attribution makes it possible for every marketer to measure the impact of their marketing across devices and cross-channel - all in one place."

Might raise privacy concerns

Now, any company which rolls out a feature that will be able to monitor the activities of credit card users is going to raise privacy concerns.

Even more so, if the company happens to be an internet giant like Google which can track the activities of 70% of the credit and debit cards in the United States alone. However, the privacy laws in Europe and other parts of the world are far more stringent and it is almost certain that this feature will run into difficulties when it is introduced in those geographies.

Google Attribute will initially be introduced in the United States and Google has stated that the company would not be aware of the products on which the individual spends but only the cumulative value of charges in a certain time frame. A Google spokesperson tried to allay the fears in relation to privacy concerns and stated that the company had been working on this product for many years, precisely because they wanted to ensure that no user date is ever compromised. In order to achieve that, the company has developed its very own encryption technology that would guard against any data breach.