Privacy Digest

As Web companies get smarter, privacy concerns grow - MarketWatch: Privacy and human rights groups fired their latest salvo Wednesday in an ongoing battle with Internet giants over their collection of personal data on Web users.

A trio of groups on Wednesday announced the filing of an amended complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over Google Inc.'s planned acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick.

The groups, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, say the deal will place too many details about private individuals into a single company's hands, without adequate protections.

The amended complaint gives the FTC more information about the way the "ability to behaviorally track or ... put together a dossier on a consumer is incredibly magnified because of the richness of these two data sets," U.S. PIRG program director Ed Mierzwinski said during a conference call.

Too often, Mierzwinski said, users do not even realize that information such as their Web searches are being stored by companies indefinitely.

Google's DoubleClick acquisition, announced in April, was quickly matched by Yahoo Inc.'s decision to purchase a remaining stake in Right Media Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s

The consolidation comes because Google, Yahoo and Microsoft share a business model that relies on tailored advertisements - which in turn are based on increasingly accurate profiling of private individuals, in order to cater to their tastes.

The appetite for personal data is therefore poised to grow alongside online ad revenue. Internet advertising revenue in the first quarter of this year reached $4.9 billion, a 26% increase over the period a year earlier, the Interactive Advertising Bureau said Wednesday.

But as companies' collective store of personal user data grows, they are also likely to draw more scrutiny over their behavior here and abroad.

"What consolidation is doing is creating a one-stop shopping system for agencies like governments to gain access to a vast treasure trove of data about individuals," said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

The risk of having troves of personal data in the hands of companies who may want to curry favor with foreign governments goes beyond simple privacy concerns, Chester said. "It's one thing (for data) to be pushed for commercial reasons, it's another when it's signed over to governments for repressive purposes," he said.

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