WASHINGTON – Republican members of the House’s Consumer Protection Subcommittee today asked Chairman Bobby Rush, D-Ill., to call a hearing into the privacy aspects of the proposed merger of Internet search behemoth Google and marketing wizard DoubleClick. 

The full Energy and Commerce Committee’s ranking Republican, Joe Barton of Texas, supported the hearing proposal, saying that “the more I know about the Google-DoubleClick merger, the more I realize that that the personal privacy of computer users doesn’t seem to be much of a priority.  Google is an information colossus already, but add on DoubleClick’s marketing power and you produce a single commercial entity that can know more about you and me than nearly everybody but mom and the IRS. It looks like the old saw, ‘I know where you live,’ is only the start. They’ll know where we go, who and what we see, and what we buy, too. And they’ll know it forever.

“They say they just want their ads to match our behavior, but I wonder if the intentional collection and coordination of all that personal data about us is such a good idea, and I wonder if I’m the only one who is feeling a little uncomfortable about it,” said Barton, co-founder of the House Privacy Caucus. “It seems to me that policymakers should know more about Google’s intentions than we do, and a serious hearing to get at the facts looks like a very good idea. I commend the subcommittee members for proposing it.”

A copy of the letter can be found here.