While Ask.com is offering users greater privacy controls this week, Google is getting grilled about its privacy controls. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) sent a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt expressing his concerns about the privacy aspects of the company’s proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick.
The letter demands answers to 24 questions addressing privacy and consumer protection aspects of the deal. Specifically, Barton, the ranking minority member of the House and Energy Commerce Committee and cofounder of the House Privacy Caucus, said he wants to know how the companies store and use information.
The letter also communicates Barton’s displeasure that Google declined to meet with committee members about the merger.
Rebuking Google
“On November 20, I wrote Google corporate officials to request that two counsels from the House Energy and Commerce Committee staff be permitted to visit your California headquarters offices, at committee expense,” Barton said in the letter.
The purpose of this trip, he explained in the letter, was to learn firsthand about existing search and targeted advertising technology, what information may be garnered through the use of this technology, how that information is used, and how that information could be used.
“Google officials with whom we spoke deemed the dates inconvenient, and the request was denied,” he wrote. “Since then, all efforts to reach a mutually agreeable time have been rebuffed, and it begins to seem that no date for a visit is sufficiently convenient to Google. Your warm initial invitation, followed by Google’s chilly response to a proposed visit by committee counsels is disconcerting.”
Google could not immediately be reached for comment on Barton’s letter.
On a Deadline
Barton’s letter asks for an explanation of retention policies for consumer data, including what is collected, who can access it, how long it is stored, and exactly how it is disposed of or deleted.
“If…