Correct me if I am wrong but are you saying one of these two companies buys people's credit card transaction history and then compares people's ad history against the transaction history? If yes, that sounds really incredible.
"And even if your business doesn’t have a large loyalty program, you can still measure store sales by taking advantage of Google’s third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States."
According to what they presented at a crypto conference, they went to great pains to avoid capturing personally identifiable transactions. The overall strategy is that Google Knows = Set A = (all ads shown for user X at Merchant Y) Merchant/Credit Card Proccessor Knows = Set B = (all $$$ paid by User X at Merchant Y), and that it is possible to cryptographically compute sum($$$ of A intersect B) without either side learning Set(User X).
Now whether you believe in the security of the algorithm and whether there are side channel leaks or attacks is another issue.
Edit: http://bristolcrypto.blogspot.com/2017/01/rwc-2017-secure-mp...
About 10 minutes in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee7oRsDnNNc
(I'm interpreting "has on you" as meaning "not anonymized.")
This article is just dumb clickbait. It's too bad the conversation is now being driven by rank nonsense. G, Jolie Facebook, does not sell data or profiles of you to third parties. That is what people should be focused on as a first step, the buying and selling of data.