Europeans worry about Google's takeover of DoubleClick

BRUSSELS: The European consumer group BEUC says it fears that Google's takeover of the online ad tracker DoubleClick will damage European Union privacy rights and limit consumers' choice of Web content.

A BEUC appeal Wednesday to EU regulators came after U.S. consumer privacy advocacy groups asked the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to look at how the two companies, when combined, would have access to an unprecedented amount of data on consumers' Web usage and Internet search habits.

Cornelia Kutterer, the senior legal advisor for BEUC, said the association had asked the European Commission and other European authorities to look into privacy concerns - even though the two companies have not yet requested EU approval for the $3.1 billion deal.

"They have, so far, complementary databases with private data. If they merge them, this could lead to unmatched databases of profiles," Kutterer said. "If they can combine them, this could lead to a violation of user privacy rights."

In a letter to data privacy and consumer rights regulators, BEUC said the new company would have and could exploit enormous amounts of personal information about users as they click on Web pages and applications.

"Never before has one single company had the market and technological power to collect and exploit so much information about what a user does on the Internet," it said.

"The unprecedented and unmatched databases of user profiles," it added, "appear also to be in clear violation of users' privacy rights."

Google's search engine relies on its user logs to compile information of the search terms entered into specific Web browsers as well as other potentially sensitive online information. The company says this helps its search engine better understand its users so that it can deliver more relevant results and advertisements.

Google's privacy policies are already being looked at by an EU panel of national data-protection officers to see if it stores search information for too long. Trying to soothe EU concerns, the company has offered to cut the time it retains data on user searches from the current 24 months to 18 months, saying this was going further than most other search engines.

Google had no immediate response to BEUC's concerns, but has said previously that the takeover "poses no risk to competition and should be approved."

BEUC said that people who agreed to give their details to DoubleClick could not have imagined that the details would be transferred to Google.

"We fear that Google will vertically leverage its keyword search dominance with DoubleClick's leadership in online banner/video display advertising, and with its Google-YouTube dominance in video search," BEUC said. "Consumers would have no real ability to choose services other than those served by Google or to simply opt out of sharing personal data with Google.