Privacy Digest

Industry-funded Group and a Compliant THREAT LEVEL Working To Derail Google-Doubleclick Probe, Privacy Group Charges - UPDATED:

Marc Rotenberg, who heads the Electronic Privacy Information Center, thinks a recent report from the Center for Democracy and Technology about search engine privacy and competition was designed to undercut a federal investigation launched after his organization filed a complaint about Google's proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick. The group argues that the marriage of Google's text ads and tracking cookies with DoubleClick's banner ad serving technology and its tracking cookies would create a company with way too much information on and power over internet users.

Rotenberg had no kind words for Threat Level's post about the report.

Why is it so difficult to say simply and plainly, 'unlike *every other* privacy group, the Center for Democracy and Technology is funded by the businesses it purports to oversee'?

This has nothing do with meeting with industry groups or government officials, it has to do with the ethics of being paid to write PR copy and pretend it's a disinterested evaluation.

And why is CDT trying so hard to show competition is working right now? Because EPIC and the Center for Digital Democracy have a very powerful complaint pending at the FTC to block the Google-Doubleclick merger which a lot of people think will succeed. Best chance the industry has is to derail the complaint is with an 'everything is ok' report. Enter CDT and a pliable media.

Threat Level, like the Democrats, need to show some spine.

UPDATE: Now CDT is none-too-happy with THREAT LEVEL (or Rotenberg).' They point out that nearly every group included in the Privacy Coalition, with the exception of US PIRG, Consumers Union and Center for Digital Democracy, gets money from corporations.' For instance, Earthlink gave Rotenberg's EPIC $32,000 in 2000.' The Electronic Frontier Foundation also accepts corporate money. And they say, CDT has never hidden that its money comes from companies and foundations.

CDT also argues that'Rotenberg misses that'its report called for federal privacy legislation, and the group wants the Federal Trade Commission to force Google to reveal what its privacy practices would be if the DoubleClick acquisition occured -- those would then be binding promises the FTC could enforce later if the merger were approved.

As readers might notice, THREAT LEVEL put itself in the middle of a flare-up of a long-standing Hatfield-McCoys feud.' Maybe that spine picture means something different from what I thought it meant.

(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)