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Anecdote time.

Short summary: I received in my Google news feed a story about something I would never expect to see in my news feed. The only rational explanations I could think of were that (i) Google had eavesdropped on an earlier conversation, or (ii) Google had received the full data for an offline credit card purchase in a bricks and mortar store made with a credit card which had been saved in my Google profile.

Full story: My wife went to a bricks and mortar bookshop to buy a boy's birthday present. In the bookshop, our daughter said he liked football, so she bought a children's book by an English footballer. She did not know what to buy beforehand, and did not look the author up online afterwards, so there was zero online footprint for the transaction. When she got home, I asked what present she'd got, and she told me it was a football book. When she told me the author's name, and I said I'd never heard of him, joking that the only footballer's names I knew were Scottish footballers from the 1980s that I'd memorised to try to fit in at school. Again this conversation had zero online footprint. The next day there was an article in my Google news feed about that specific English footballer. I don't recall ever seeing any football related story in my newsfeed, so would never expect to have seen that specific footballer appear by chance.

I'm inclined in this case to believe it was Google buying data on credit card transactions for credit cards linked to the Google account. I keep on meaning to ask around if anyone knows if Google do this. Perhaps someone here knows?

A quick Google search suggests that this might possible.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/30/17801880/google-mastercar...

It's interesting to see how slowly we are all catching up to what is going on behind the scenes, and how we all struggle to come to terms with the implications.

Thanks for the link. Certainly sounds feasible. FWIW the credit card used for the purchase was a Mastercard. This would definitely go beyond what is described in the article though because (i) I'm pretty sure neither of us were shown any online adverts for football related children's books prior to going into the store (if we had they'd have stuck out like a sore thumb among all the unicorn, pony, fairy etc. children's books we normally see based on our purchase history), (ii) to target an individual's newsfeed the Mastercard data can't have been anonymised.

Is it possible that there's a missing step where before any of this happens there's a story on google about the footballer which your wife read/saw so when someone says "buy a book about football" and that name appeared for it in the shop it was the one she picked up?

Pretty sure that wouldn't be the case - neither of us have any interest in football, to the point that if we ever saw anything football related in a news feed or advert or whatever we'd have noticed because it would have been so odd.