FTC Asked to Block Google-DoubleClick Merger

EPIC, CDD and US PIRG today filed a complaint (pdf) with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), urging the Commission to open an investigation into the proposed acquisition. The groups urged the FTC to assess the ability of Google to record, analyze, track, and profile the activities of Internet users with data that is both personally identifiable and data that is not personally identifiable. The groups further urged the FTC to require Google to publicly present a plan to comply with well-established government and industry privacy standards such as the OECD Privacy Guidelines. Pending the resolution of these and other issues, EPIC encouraged the FTC to halt the acquisition. See EPIC's FTC Google Complaint page.

To the best of my knowledge there is no issue here since the majority of the data collected by Double-Click is actually owned by its clients, those doing the actual advertising on the internet. I seriously doubt that these advertisers are going to willingly share this information about their customers without being amply compensated for this information. Lets face it, the one thing that keeps a company going to the ability to understand and market to its customers, and sharing customer information is not something that company's readily do on any regular basis.

The complaint is summarized here:

"The acquisition of DoubleClick will permit Google to track both a person's Internet searches and a person's web site visits," the three organizations said in a joint 11-page complaint. The privacy of 1.1 billion Internet users is at stake, they argue.

EPIC had previously called DoubleClick's practices into question seven years ago, when it asked the FTC to look into its plans to merge data into its systems on consumer's offline behavior following the purchase of Abacus, a direct marketing company.

DoubleClick later gave up on that initiative, and ended its measure to profile online consumers altogether. In many ways, this new complaint is very similar to that project, in that Google would like to merge search data with DoubleClick's information.

Google is being accused of unfair and deceptive trade practices, and failing to follow the standards set by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which list industry standards for consumer privacy.

This is not the only effort to address privacy concerns surrounding Google's data collection practices: a European privacy rights group plans to begin a similar effort against the company across the Atlantic.

To its defense, Google has said it had a "history of being an advocate for user privacy," and is "committed to transparency for end users, and to respecting the choices they make with regards to their privacy preferences."