NewsOracle Can Now Track Your Offline Purchases

Oracle is consciously expanding its reach. According to Wired, the Silicon Valley tech giant announced that it has agreed to purchase Datalogix, a company that collects information from retailers and shares it with partners such as Facebook and Twitter. Notably, Facebook now uses the company’s data to determine whether consumers have purchased goods in the real world after seeing them advertised online.

This happened 10 months post the company’s announcement of acquiring Bluekai, another marketing setup that focuses on behavioral information. However, it seems that Oracle wants to merge Datalogix’s dataset with other assets, in order to improve how companies develop and gauge digital marketing and advertising campaigns.

According to the non-profit digital rights group EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Datalogix relies heavily on data from loyalty-cards—those cards that provide discounts on purchases and require that you provide your name, email address, and phone number. A company like Facebook can then match such data with people online.

At least in the case of Facebook, however, Datalogix does not share specific customer information. The two companies use a “hashing” system that converts each person’s information into a jumble of digital data, and then they can match up these hashes. But the EFF points out that although they’re tracked anonymously, users are still tracked—and they don’t have the option of turning this tracking off.