Privacy Digest

Google Seals DoubleClick Deal, Learns More About You - Via Threat Level:

Google finalized its $3.1 billion purchase of ad delivery giant DoubleClick Tuesday after European Union regulators ruled that the purchase does not violate anti-monopoly rules in Europe which removed the last legal hurdle for the hotly contested acquisition.

Microsoft hoped that regulators in Europe and the United States would block or attach conditions to the purchase as a way to slow Google's growing lead in online advertising and search. Privacy groups opposed the sale on the grounds it would give Google too much information about what individuals do on the internet and thus much power to shape what content is created online.

The European Commission did not see it that way:

[T]he merged entity would not have the ability to engage in strategies aimed at marginalising Google's competitors, mainly because of the presence of credible ad serving alternatives to which customers (publishers/advertisers/ad networks) can switch, in particular vertically integrated companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL. The market investigation also found that the merged entity would not have the incentive to close off access for competitors in the ad serving market, mainly because such strategies would be unlikely to be profitable.

DoubleClick is an ad serving and management company that web publishers use to display and target visual and rich media advertising. The technology uses a DoubleClick cookie that reports back every time a user visits a site using the system, letting DoubleClick know that user 453689 likes to read motocross stories and GQ magazine and spends a lot of time playing online Flash games.

Google can merge that database with its deep knowledge of users' search histories, along with its growing database of URLs visited by Google users who don't realize that Google opts-in users to its "Web History" program, which continually tracks their every step on the internet, not just when they are on a Google property, though that isn't clearly disclosed when users create a Google account nor even if they click on the "learn more" link.

So what does the purchase mean for citizens on the web? 

Very clearly, you will soon be seeing more ads served by Google technology, and Google technology will be seeing and saving more information about what you do around the web than every before.

Prior to the purchase Google said it could not say what privacy policies will govern the new online behaivoral database made possible by its acquisitions, citing SEC rules. But they did say it would improve the privacy practices around what are known as 'third party cookies,' that is, cookies served up by a website that are not attached to that particular domain (such as the Google Analytics cookie served up on THREAT LEVEL).

A Google spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment on what Google's new policies will be for letting users opt-in or out-of tracking around the web.

Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy says the EU, like the FCC before it, doesn't get the power of Google's ad network to shape what content gets published on the web.

"By failing to impose safeguards, EC regulators have helped strengthen a growing digital colossus that will now be in a dominant position to shape much of the global future of the Internet and other online media," Chester said in a press release. "This decision will have profound and unfortunate consequences for the Internet’s evolving role as a democratic communications medium."

Like Chester, the Annenberg School of Communication's Joseph Turow sees a foreshadowing of Microsoft buying Yahoo, thus creating a virtual duopoly in online advertising.

There is no stopping of the centralized collection and use of data about consumer’s habits online and off.  [...] The decision portends the approval of Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo, and of Reed Elsevier’s decision to purchase Choicepoint. 

In the face of a very few companies that can track all of us across media and a very few companies that can sell the media trackers even more specific information about all of us, a basic question becomes increasingly important:  What can citizens who want to control the data companies and governments have about them (data which really tell the stories of their lives) do?

See Also:

• Google-DoubleClick Privacy Fight Hangs Over Fed's E-Advertising Forum
• Microsoft Tells Congress That Google-DoubleClick Would Create Panopticon Monopoly
• Google Says Microsoft Has More User Information
• Privacy Groups Call For Do-Not-Track-Me List to Rein In Online Advertising
• Google Trying to Appease Regulators and Fight Privacy Groups, Says ...
• Consumer Privacy Groups Seek Halt to Google-DoubleClick Deal
• Google Hires Gonzales' Privacy Lawyer

(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)