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During a hearing of the European Parliament (EP)'s Civil Liberties Committee, on 21 January 2008, serious data protection concerns were raised by the practice of large Internet companies that monitor the online behaviour of their users in order to provide online advertisers with the necessary information to better target their ads.

The main debate turned around the Google-Double Click deal that is now being examined by the European Commission and that was already approved in the US in December 2007 by the Federal Trade Commission.

Google criticised MEPs and rights advocates of trying "to take a privacy case and shoehorn it into a competition law review" but Sophie In 't Veld, replied to these accusations: "The reason you want to have the data is because it gives you a competitive advantage. It is business. I don't think they can be completely disconnected."

Representatives of the industry and consumer protection bodies addressed the EP Civil Liberties Committee claiming that the tracking down of online behaviour is threatening to personal privacy and that there is no guarantee these data are used only for advertisement targeting. MEP Stavros Lambrinidis of Greece expressed the worries related to the lack of a communitary legislation that ensures the personal data are used only for advertising purposes saying that "there is no EU legislation per se to ensure that information targeting behaviour for marketing purposes will not be used for other activities that far exceed the initial purpose."

In his turn, EDPS Peter Hustinx said: "Community law on data protection does apply on the Internet, it applies to both online and offline realities (...) existing rules do apply and do provide safeguards".

Google's Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer stated that the merger between Google and DoubleClick would not lead to the creation of a single database with consumer-related information, as "DoubleClick does not own its customers' data". He also added that the online ad company "can only use the data it processes from serving ads to provide aggregate reporting. The data is owned by the publishers or advertisers that DoubleClick works for (...) DoubleClick customers would be very displeased if one tried to undo their contractual relationships by sharing information between advertisers".

The merger case is now with DG Competition being examined for potential violations of antitrust rules in the online advertising intermediary market. The European Commission is to decide whether or not to authorise the merger on 2 April 2008.

One issue that was also strongly debated was that of the IP address being considered personal data or not. In the opinion of the EU group of data privacy regulators, the IP address should generally be considered as personal information.

Google's view has been expressed by Fleischer who stated: "There is no black or white answer: sometimes an IP address can be considered as personal data and sometimes not, it depends on the context, and which personal information it reveals." But Marc Rotenberg, the Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center contradicted this statement: I wish this was the case, but we are moving towards the IP6 model, for which it will be even more the case that IP addresses will be personably identifiable".

Peter Scharr, Germany's data protection commissioner who leads the EU Article 29 Data Protection Working Group which is preparing a report on the compliance with EU data protection acts of the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others, said that if someone could be identified by an IP address "then it has to be regarded as personal data."

Do Internet companies protect personal data well enough? (26.01.2008)
http://www.neurope.eu/articles/82144.php

Google-DoubleClick deal likely to win EU go-ahead (25.01.2008)
http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSL2589361220080125

Internet privacy concerns cause very public row in Brussels (23.01.2008)
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hQ47Tl9N_w06bGdc5UBcXzg1lPRA

EU data regulator says Internet addresses are personal information (21.01.2008)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8035260?nclick_check=1

Google seeks to allay privacy fears over DoubleClick merger (22.01.2008)
http://www.euractiv.com/en/infosociety/google-seeks-allay-privacy-fear...

EDRi-gram: EC announces a larger investigation of the Google-DoubleClick deal (26.11.2007)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.22/in-depth-google