EPIC files suit with FTC over Google's opaque Store Sales Measurement plan to track shoppers' in-store purchases, saying users have no easy way to opt out
A prominent privacy rights watchdog is asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate a new Google advertising program … Tweets: @profcarroll Tweets: David Carroll / @profcarroll : Major FTC complaint from @EPICprivacy on Google's re-id schemes that protect companies not people. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... via @jason_kint http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
EPIC's complaint lands on a regulator with unfinished business: a 2015 report revealed that key FTC staff had already recommended suing Google over anticompetitive tactics back in 2012, and the agency passed. Now the privacy group is pressing the same commission on a different flank — Google's Store Sales Measurement program, which ties ad exposure to shoppers' physical purchases with what EPIC calls no easy opt-out.
The complaint matters because it frames offline purchase tracking as a consent problem rather than just an advertising feature, and it arrives years before Google's later privacy positioning would itself become evidence in the government's antitrust work.
First-order effects
- The FTC must decide whether to open an investigation into Store Sales Measurement, putting Google's claim that users can meaningfully opt out under formal scrutiny for the first time.
- Advertisers and retail partners feeding transaction data into the program face uncertainty about whether the measurement pipeline can survive a consent challenge.
Second-order effects
- Rival ad platforms gain a talking point: if Google's offline tracking draws federal attention, competitors can market their own measurement as the consent-clean alternative while lobbying behind the scenes.
- A critical FTC posture here would harden the agency's file on Google generally — the same record that resurfaced when Google's pro-privacy moves were later reported to have boosted the US antitrust probe as publishers cried foul.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, privacy complaints like this one function as building blocks: each documented practice widens the evidentiary base regulators can draw on, echoing how the 2012 staff recommendation to sue Google stayed dormant but usable years later.
- Structurally, the fight pushes the industry toward treating opt-out mechanics as a legal requirement rather than a settings-page afterthought, with whoever controls the default controlling the data flow.
The trend: Watchdog complaints are converting ad-tracking practices into regulatory leverage, gradually folding privacy enforcement into the broader antitrust case against Google.