The search advertising company’s appointment with a Senate Judiciary subcommittee later this week has prompted Google to respond to privacy concerns on its blogs.
We’ve noted before that Google’s Public Policy blog provides an entertaining read for those interested in the search industry. They have come through again with a new post by policy counsel Pablo Chavez.
Chavez provided several excerpts of articles written in op-ed pieces on major media outlets, all of which find no issues in the marketplace should the $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick by Google pass regulatory hurdles.
An appropriate observation here would be to compare what has been excerpted to what isn’t being said. Music fans know the spaces between the notes are as important as the notes themselves. Chavez’s selections leave plenty of spaces.
No one is arguing counter to the Financial Times’ editorial claim that Google and DoubleClick are different types of businesses. That hasn’t been the concern.
The question that has to be answered is, can a single company post-Google/DoubleClick deal compete effectively with them? That doesn’t even begin to touch the issue of all that personal data the combined company would have at its fingertips.
Harvard Business School professor John Deighton’s excerpt, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times, believes Google will behave itself with regards to that data. Investment firm Piper Jaffray, whose former star Safa Rashtchy’s Google cheerleading has been picked up by current star Gene Munster, likewise feels advertiser concerns about the two companies sharing ad data “are likely overblown.”
Really, one reads things like this, and wonders if the people making these comments truly have a worldview of corporations akin to a small fawn seeing the headlights of an onrushing Hummer for the first and last time on a stretch of highway. They just don’t see what could possibly go wrong.
Maybe there isn’t cause for concern, but being told we should just trust a multi-billion dollar corporation to do the right thing, because, you know, they aren’t evil, doesn’t inspire us with complete confidence.
