Search engine giant Google has criticised lawmakers for questioning whether its takeover of DoubleClick will affect citizens' web privacy in their scrutiny of data issues in Europe.European parliamentarians and privacy advocates brought up the subject of whether the $3.1 billion transaction would affect internet privacy in an online data protection hearing on Monday, Reuters reports.
Google announced its intention to acquire the digital marketing technology firm in April last year and the deal was recently given the go ahead by the Federal Trade Commission, a commissioner for which said at the hearing that the topic of privacy had not entered into its discussions.
However, yesterday saw Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, take issue with the European parliamentarians' query into privacy.
"People [are] trying to take a privacy case and shoehorn it into a competition law review," he stated.
Dutch parliamentarian Sophie in 't Veld responded with the claim that Google would have a "competitive advantage" with access to DoubleClick's data and said "that side of things" should also be discussed.
Meanwhile, the same hearing saw Peter Scharr, German commissioner for data protection and head of the European Union's data privacy regulator group, recommend that IP addresses be viewed as personal information that could be used to identify individuals.
However, Mr Fleischer said that Google uses IP addresses to provide search results based on the location and language most relevant to users, and that this information could not be used to identify specific people, the Associated Press reports.
