Not really Google, although I'm sure they do it. But I had a meeting with a credit card vendor yesterday. They process credit cards for restaurants. Companies name is Swipely. They can give restaurants detailed information on the customers that pay with their credit cards. Now this isn't new, it's been going on for years. But what IS new is now this company can access your FB, Twitter, and Yelp accounts, your phone number and email addresses. Not only that, they can drill down and say Nacho ordered the pizza the last 3 times he was here. So let's send Nacho an email stating we are having a special on pizzas. Before restaurants could see that pizza's where a big hit, so they send out a blast email, now it's directed to Nacho and anybody else who ordered X number of pizzas in the last few weeks. And if Nacho puts it on FB that he received a email discount for XYZ company then they can read that and determine if it's a good promotion or not. And believe me, it goes much deeper than just ordering pizza's. They can tell if you are local, out of town, or a regular customer. First time customer and tried the fried chicken? But second time you came back you didn't order it. Let's reduce the price of the fried chicken and see if Nacho orders it again. Oh he did? Good, let's order more fried chicken because we just sent Nacho an invite on FB to try our secret new recipe.
And here's the kicker, Swipely can do all this for the same price as your current credit card vendor. How oh how is this possible? Give the restaurant all this information for no extra cost? Shhhhhh don't say anything, but Swipely sells the customers data. That's where they make their money. Before you could look down and say Nacho ordered $100 worth of stuff on Tuesday. Now they can drill down deeper and see that Nacho ordered pizza on Tuesday with a beer. On Wed, he ordered wings with Jameson and a diet coke (he must have been treating Sirharles). Line item by line item. They actually contract out the credit card crap...so it's probably the same company doing it as before, but now they are data mining all of your information. And the restaurants can wash their hands and say, we don't have the information, Swipely does. We just use the information, but we aren't the ones collecting it. But let's not tell the customer because that's just bad business.
Start paying with cash people.
