[strawberrypuree]

“Google Pay will never sell your data to third parties or share your transaction history with the rest of Google for targeting ads,” the company said.

From what I can tell, nothing in this statement actually precludes targeting ads based on spending. If it did, they would just say that. They only preclude selling the data or sharing it with the ads team. But that was never the model to start with! This is a sleight of hand by Google to cover up what they actually do: profile users and then offer that profiling to other companies in the form of a service.

To put it more explicitly, you can say “I’ll put your ad in front of 20 year olds with an interest in skateboarding” without selling user data or even sharing profile data with the ads team. You just simply get the ads and the target market and use the data to put the ad in front of them.

And doesn’t the fact that Google says they won’t do those things proof that they know their entire business model is super shady and wouldn’t be appreciated by users if they fully understood it?