Google DoubleClick buyout attacked in complaint filed with FTC

Stan Beer
Saturday, 21 April 2007 10:31

Your IT - Home IT

Three privacy groups have filed a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission saying the acquisition of DoubleClick by Google will injure consumers by invading their privacy and harm the public interest. Google and DoubleClick, however, claim that their respective data sets cannot be combined to gain more information on consumers.

Google tracks all searches performed using its site and stores all of the search terms together with the IP address of each computer performing a search. DoubleClick tracks individual Internet users who receive ads served through the company's ad servers, assigning each user a unique number which is recorded in a cookie file on the user's computer.

The complaint, filed by Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy, and US Privacy Information Research Group, paints a scenario where the combination of the technology of the two web advertising giants will threaten the privacy of more than 1 billion Internet users.

"The acquisition of DoubleClick will permit Google to track both a person’s Internet searches and a person’s web site visits. This could impact the privacy interests of 233 million Internet users in North America, 314 million Internet users in Europe, and more than 1.1 billion Internet users around the world," the privacy groups state in their official complaint.

At present, Google stores user searches indefinitely while DoubleClick stores a history of ads served to individual users for two years. Google announced in March this year that it intends to make searches anonymous after two years. However, the privacy groups point out in their joint complaint that AOL, which was severely embarrassed when the searches of more than 650,000 of its members were exposed in 2006, had also anonymized its searches but members' privacy had still been compromised.

In their submission to the FTC, the privacy groups attack Google for not disclosing up front to users the extent to which their identities are revealed during searches. As a result, most users are in the dark about the possibilities for their privacy to be compromised. Most users will never reach the page that provides details of Google's data collection practices because it is four links removed from the home page,according to the groups.