CDT has been suggesting that the Google/DoubleClick merger simply heightened existing concerns on what the industry as a whole is doing. The recent reaction to Phorm’s testing in Britiain and growth in ISP ad targeting industry shows that remains true today.

However, we were hoping that the FTC or the EU would ask Google to explain exactly how the information that DoubleClick collects will be used. Despite the fact that neither government body required this, CDT still believes that it is in Google’s own interest — in order to maintain the trust of its users — to explain fully what it is doing with DoubleClick data, now and as its use of the data evolves.

In particular, questions still remain such as: Will the data still be owned by the marketer as DoubleClick’s contracts require today? Will it be used for behavioral targeting by other Google products? How transparent will any collection be in the future?

We look forward to many more discussions on these issues as Google begins using DoubleClick’s data

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 11:32 am and is filed under CDT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.