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Mastercard has secret contract to supply Google with offline transaction records
July 27, 2025
Well, it turns out that Google knows about at least some of those as well. We know this now becauseBloombergjust exposed a secret Mastercard-Google contract which gives the search giant access to the offline transaction records of a portion of Mastercard’s two billion customers.
While the contract itself isn’t that surprising, the fact that both Google and Mastercard kept the agreement a secret from the public is a little concerning.
According to three anonymous people who worked directly on the deal, Google and Mastercard negotiated the contract over the span of about four years. Although an exact amount wasn’t disclosed, it’s alleged that Google paid Mastercard millions of dollars for the customer data. The two companies also discussed sharing profits from ad revenue related to the data, although Google denied this was the case.
Google did make a statement on the security of the advertising tool related to the contract, but neglected to directly discuss the Mastercard partnership:
The encryption technology Google is referencing enables the tracking of data and connecting it to a user’s profile, but then sharing that data anonymously with advertisers and Google. In other words, it goes like this:
Google emphasized in its statement that users can opt-out of ad-tracking at any time; however, the fact that no one knew this was happening makes that advice a little disingenuous.
A Mastercard spokesperson also declined to comment on the Google partnership directly but pointed out that Mastercard often shares transaction history with merchants and service providers.
According to anonymous tipsters speaking withBloomberg, Google has had discussions with other credit card companies about partnerships, and ad agencies have approached Google about tracking even more offline information about customers, such as the time of the transactions and how much was spent.
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