Sunday, April 22, 2007

Google's acquisition of Doubleclick worrying privacy advocates

The practise of using cookies to store information has always worried people worried about their privacy. Even in the matter of a search engine, Google's saving of user searches has worried people in the past, and Google announced in March of this year that they would take steps to drop such information from their servers after a period of time.
However, with Google buying DoubleClick, these privacy concerns are causing more worry. When DoubleClick was at its prime, there were regular accusations that it was not very concerned about users privacy and shared this information with its advertisers.
Google bought DoubleClick primarily to take advantage of its knowledge and market related to banner ads. DoubleClick has built a network that serves banner ads and then tracks user activities through cookies, leveraging this information to better server its advertiser. Now that Google has bought this, it brings DoubleClick's abilities into much stronger limelight.
Google has a corporate slogan about 'Do no evil'. However, it has a business about monetising its search, and in order to provide a good service to advertisers, it has to better track its customer profile and their activities, thus bring them into conflict with privacy advocates. This battle is only going to grow, and is guaranteed to not reflect positively on Google.

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