FTC Investigating Google-DoubleClick Deal

An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times is covering FTC interest in Google's purchase of the DoubleClick service. The investigation is in response to privacy group concerns over the amount of information Google will have available to it via its ad service and DoubleClick. Between a few days and a week from now the FTC should either declare the all clear, or elevate the process to a 'second request' stage. That would indicate more serious issues the federal body has an interest in. Google stated it was confident the purchase would hold up under scrutiny. 'In the complaint, the groups noted that Google collects the search histories of its users, while DoubleClick tracks what Web sites people visit. The merger, according to their complaint, would give one company access to more information about the Internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world.'"

Comments

If your worried

[CastrTroy]

If you're worried about how much data Google and doubleclick are collecting, then just block them from you firewall. If you never connect to their servers, they can't collect any information. If enough people start to do this kind of thing, they will have to start to find a new way of doing business.

Re:If your worried

[rtb61]

If you want to control google run this http://www.customizegoogle.com/ on top of firefox in preference to the google toolbar.

Re:If your worried

[Aladrin]

Seriously? You think the fact that Google bought DoubleClick will even be widely known? Or that they will suddenly stop blocking DC because it's owned by the 'good guys', even though absolutely nothing about the company has changed?

Not likely. It's much more likely the DC's mud will rub off on Google, and people will be more likely to block it as well.

Since I've got NoScript installed now, I didn't bother to unblock Google's traffic stuff. It doesn't do anything for -me-, so it stays blocked.

Re:If your worried

[badasscat]

But how do you really stop Google from storing all this data.

With a law.

How do you control what data they are allowed to store.

With a law.

Is yahoo somehow exempt from this because they receive less traffic?

No, Yahoo is exempt because they do not collect the same type of information. Laws only affect those who undertake the actions defined within the law.

The problem here is that how do you define too much, and what's the difference between google collecting a whole bunch of data, and your government census department collecting a whole bunch of data, and making it a crime if you don't respond to the census.

The difference is the law. Provisions for the census are in the US Constitution. It was the law of the land long before you were ever born and most likely long before your family even arrived here.

I mean, I know the /. crowd leans towards the libertarian side of things, but some people act as if they've never even heard of the rule of law around here. I guess given our current administration, that's probably not too surprising - but the fact remains that there's no inalienable right that says Google should be allowed to collect all this data on its users, which means there's no reason not to make it illegal if that's what's determined to be in the public interest.

Who makes these determinations? The people we elect specifically for that purpose. This is why we have a congress. You can call them incompetent, you're free to dislike your representatives, but it's not like it's some big mystery who gets tasked with drafting laws in our governmental system. That is your congressperson's job. If you don't like the job they're doing, then vote for somebody else next time - but this is what they're there to do, and as long as they're there, you should use them.

I think there is also a tendency for some people to turn fairly simple questions of law into larger philosophical debates. I don't really understand the reason for that. If people don't like the fact that Google is going to be collecting all this data, then we should pressure our congress to draft a law that stops them or anyone else from doing it. It's really that simple. There's no point worrying about whether it would apply to one company or another or why it doesn't apply to government or whatever. Laws are designed to address practical and specific societal issues; they're not designed to address abstract philosophical ethical questions.

Re:If your worried

[Guppy06]

"Provisions for the census are in the US Constitution. It was the law of the land long before you were ever born and most likely long before your family even arrived here."

The Census is required to ask you the following:

1. How many people are in your household? Don't count untaxed Indians
2. Of those, how many are men at least 21 years of age?
3. Of those, how many are enfranchised?

Anything else isn't "the law of the land."

Re:If your worried

[h2_plus_O]

But how do you really stop [someone] from [something]

With a law.

If it was that simple, illegal drugs wouldn't be available, would they? Murder wouldn't happen, right?
We'd need enforcement to ensure compliance with said law, which means empowering the government to inspect private company data to make sure it's not the verboten kind of data we don't want them collecting. This would require congress to grant unprecedented powers to law enforcement, essentially rendering all privately held data subject to government inspection. If you're concerned about private companies having too much information or too much power, think about the ramifications of a government authorized to access (for "verification purposes only") any privately-held business data- I respectfully submit that this would be a worse problem than having private companies legally allowed to capture public data.

There's also the question of how to differentiate appropriate customer information from the kind you want to forbid: for example, my wife owns a small business and (like pretty much all business owners) she keeps track of her customers- this includes having phone numbers and addresses in a database. For a law to do what you're suggesting, there would need to be a legal distinction between the kind of data my wife's business keeps and the kind of data you don't want Google to have. IANAL, but I'm not sure that's legally possible.

Laws are designed to address practical and specific societal issues

They're also highly prone, just like software, to creating unintended consequences that may be less desirable than the problem they seek to correct. Some examples:

• The income tax deduction, designed to make it less expensive to own a home, makes it more expensive for the majority of borrowers (for whom it's cheaper to take the standard deduction) to borrow, by artificially inflating the rate the market will bear.
• The War on Drugs, designed to make drugs too expensive to be used/abused, has instead made drug trade profitable; it is now the funding source of choice for organized crime and we have just as many addicts today as we did when we started.
• The law against hiring undocumented workers is intended to protect domestic labor; instead it creates conditions in which undocumented workers cannot demand comparable wages, depressing the wages domestic workers would theoretically command.
• The income tax for businesses is designed to reduce the tax burden individuals (especially the very poor) pay, by making companies shoulder some of the costs. Companies pass this tax along in the form of higher prices, lower wages and reduced profit, which impact the very poor disproportionately.
• The federal subsidy on food crops is intended to make food cheap and plentiful; however when US farmers undersell global market rates, they put foreign farmers out of work. Those workers then compete for manufacturing jobs in cities, driving down labor costs and putting US manufacturers out of work.

...when anyone blithely suggests 'making a law' to fix a problem, I generally wonder a) how we survived without one for so long, b)whether the right solution really is to expand the role of government in our lives, c) if this new law will be (like so many others) ignored, or d) if it will create worse problems than it solves.
In this situation, where the 'problem' is that a private company might have too much power, I'm suspicious of a solution that involves concentrating even more power in the hands of even fewer people.

I can see it now...

[PixieDust]

There's an emergency government meeting behind closed doors...

Suit 1:"So there's this new Google deal going down. Apparently some companies have their panties in a twist because of how much information Google will have."

Suit 2: "How much information are we talking about?"

Suit 3: "Well, Doubleclick catches a lot of web traffic information, browsing patterns, etc. and Google already mines tons of data..."

Suit 1 begins crunching some numbers. "Good God! We have to put a stop to this! Soon they'll know more than we do! That's it. I want the Board (from Google) in here now. They'll be more than happy to give us wha6t we wish. After all, it'd be a shame if something unfortunate happened..."

Weird wording

[niconorsk]

The merger, according to their complaint, would give one company access to more information about the Internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world. Wasn't this the case for Google before they bought Google? Not to dismiss their worries(Google freaks me out sometimes), but they could have found a better way to voice them.

Re:Weird wording

[s.bots]

The merger, according to their complaint, would give one company access to more information about the Internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world. Isn't this going to be the case anyway? If google doesn't have access to more information than any other company, that means that some other company would have the most information. Perhaps google has access to more information than the others combined (though I can't imagine that is the case)?

Re:Weird wording

[WombatDeath]

It's a very strange point altogether. For any subject X, some company is going to have more information about X than any other company in the world. It's inevitable, unless you somehow manage to enforce some sort of weird inter-company information-sharing law.

Litmous test

[foniksonik]

Would they (FTC) force Google to spin off a section of the company IF they had developed the technology themselves?

If not then this deal should be fine. If so, well they better be able to prove why... with precedents like Microsoft still around, it'll be a hard sell.

So.. who's number one right now?

[Anonymous Coward]

So they are complaining that this deal will give Google more information about consumers than any other company in the world. Now, I'm all for a healthy dose of tin-foil in my daily diet but someone has to have more information than everyone else. Am I the only one wondering who has the most information right now and why there isn't a complaint against that company already with the FTC?

Re:So.. who's number one right now?

[ookabooka]

Am I the only one wondering who has the most information right now and why there isn't a complaint against that company already with the FTC?
Well I think its more like right now Double click and Google have roughly the same "amount" of information, but since they are in different areas its hard to quantify. After the merger, when one heuristically quantifies the amount of information they have compared to other companies, one concludes that Google definitely has "more" than the other companies.

So think of it like this: Who has more fruit, John with apples, Betsy with oranges, or Fran with tomatoes(a fruit). Well they all have the same "amount" of fruit, though they are different in terms of weight, amount of vitamin C, etc. But if John and Betsy combine forces, it is easier to say that Fran has "less" fruit than John & Betsy LLC.

Well, no wonder

[Bullfish]

People lie regularly on the net when answering surveys, filling out forms etc. They can still track you, but other than that, they can only have the information you give them. Survey after survey has found people lie when talking about themselves on-line etc. Not a surprise even if it really isn't all that effective. If you are really concerned, there are things like TOR that can help you be anonymous. Ultimately, people have to accept the web is not a private place. If you can see them, they can see you. Act accordingly.

I would like to see a FTC stipulation that after infromation has been "aged", it should be deleted. I doubt though that in these paranoid times it will happen though, so I can only say keep on lying and use TOR etc if you don't like the prying eyes.

As far as google not being evil. They are a business.

Oh no!

[Dancindan84]

90% of Google users search for boobies
90% of DoubleClick's responses are people clicking on ads with boobies

Combined together, they'll know that 90% of internet users want to find booies! That's just too much power for one company to have!

My response to the doubleclick deal

[Lengyel]

My response to the doubleclick deal has to add the following entries to my /etc/hosts file. It's most gratifying to see blank spaces formerly occupied by distracting advertisements. Initially I defined ad.doubleclick.net to be the localhost address in /etc/hosts, and then found the other addresses below at http://radio.weblogs.com/0103807/categories/rant/2 002/04/23.html.

127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 img.x10.com
127.0.0.1 ads.x10.com
127.0.0.1 www.x10.com
127.0.0.1 x10.com
127.0.0.1 ads.addynamix.com
127.0.0.1 leadgreed.com
127.0.0.1 www.leadgreed.com
127.0.0.1 c1.zedo.com
127.0.0.1 ad.trafficmp.com
127.0.0.1 media.adcentriconline.com

Re:How about credit bureaus?

[Mr. Underbridge]

Completely false, have you ever seen a credit report? They basically show available credit vs credit used for each account as well as the status of the account and any delinquencies. Theres maybe 10 fields total for each account. Nothing even close to a list of purchases.

Incidentally, I have seen my credit report. Those guys keep a record of every account you've ever had. They can figure out which ones are mortgages and car loans (that's what I mean by purchases, they don't care about your grocery bill). They know your spending habits and balance on every line of credit you have. They know about every late payment you've ever made. All in all, that's *quite* a lot of information, and I maintain my general point that this information is much more dangerous to consumers (identity theft, anyone?) than what Google can glean of your search history. So again, if you invalidate the merger, shut down the credit bureaus. If we're uncomfortable with companies collecting information on consumers, let's apply the standard universally.