| Google buys Doubleclick |
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| Tuesday, 11 March 2008 | |||||
By acquiring Doubleclick for more than 3 billion dollars, Google expands its reach for serving advertisements online. More importantly however, Google can now merge it’s own collected data with the data collected by Doubleclick. Privacy groups complained this could pose serious threats to people’s privacy. Data collection and targeted advertising is clearly where the money is to be found on the internet, and Google is doing exactly that. The question is : which data is being collected ? Doubleclick already acknowledged they merge the info gathered by people clicking on their ads with actual people’s names and info from offline marketing databases. Google can also easily link its users to their behaviour, and with a larger part of the Internet now covered even more so. Privacy groups don’t trust Google to protect people’s privacy enough if it meant making less money. Next to privacy groups, companies like Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL were bidding on Doubleclick, while at the same time arguing the Google-Doubleclick deal would narrow the field too much for them to normally compete. Nevertheless, The European Commission has given its blessing to the acquisition. The Commission’s findings were that consumer interests wouldn’t be hurt, nor would it impede competition. Doubleclick announced the acquisition by Google on it’s website yesterday.
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