Did Google Not Know What It Was Buying?

Stefanie Olsen at CNet notes this from an L.A. Times article about Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick:
Google’s associate general counsel, Nicole Wong, said Monday that Google did in fact hope to integrate the two companies’ “non-personally identifiable data,” and that mixing them would be of “great benefit” to both consumers and advertisers.

Except:
“Any and all information collected by DoubleClick is, and will remain, the property of the company’s clients. Ownership rights, like the other terms of DoubleClick’s client contracts, will be unaffected by any acquisition,” according to DoubleClick.

The problem, according to Olsen, is that DoubleClick, and thus Google, does not own any of the user data generated by DoubleClick’s clients. DoubleClick doesn’t sell ads, it sells ad technology, and thus isn’t supposed to have access to data about users on the ad networks. At best, DoubleClick has access to data it cannot own, and if it does, that is […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg