A Conversation With Google's Nicole Wong
Google Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong took a brief break from her busy trip to Washington on Friday afternoon to meet with a small group of reporters at the Internet search giant's D.C. office.
A day earlier, David Drummond, Google's vice president for corporate development, squared off against Microsoft General Counsel Brad Sherman at a hearing on Google's proposed $3.1 billion bid for the DoubleClick online advertising firm.
With the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee showdown still fresh in her mind (and ours), Wong responded to suggestions made by some industry and consumer advocates that the merger should hinge on specific conditions.
"I don't think there should be conditions on this deal [from an antitrust perspective]," she told us over an assortment of Corner Bakery sandwiches and cookies. Google's rivals similarly acquired firms with no strings attached, she pointed out.
Yahoo recently bought ad firm Right Media; America Online acquired the European-based player Adtech AG online and behavioral targeting firm Tacoda; and Microsoft paid $6 billion for the Web ad provider aQuantive.
But the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Marc Rotenberg told lawmakers on Thursday that the FTC, which is examining the union, should "act to block the deal or to impose substantial privacy safeguards as a condition of the deal’s approval."
Wong, a former partner at Perkins Coie, noted that "our mission to make all the world's information universally accessible and useful means we use a lot of data to deliver our services. That obviously raises privacy issues."
Nevertheless, "most of our strategies are based on transparency and choice," Wong said. "We try to write easy-to-understand policies… and it's very hard for lawyers to do that," she joked, adding that Google's privacy policy may get an update before the year's end.
Wong also addressed a recent report by Privacy International that slammed Google's attempts to safeguard user data. She indicated the document's treatment of her firm was unfair and there were "lots of allegations" that were not based in fact.
The European Union's data retention law was a topic of discussion too. The EU is intended to harmonize policies among its members but the mandate, which directs firms to keep data from six to 24 months "is not a harmonization from an operational standpoint," she said.
So far, at least three EU members have drafted their own data retention legislation and "they're all over the map," Wong said. Google decided to anonymize its search server logs after 18 months -- a timeframe that jives with the company's business needs and does not require an overhaul of its infrastructure.
The bottom line, according to Wong, is that it "takes a long time to develop norms for any given industry." Traditional media, which evolved from print to radio to broadcast TV to cable and satellite, had decades to figure it out.
"On the Internet … some new-fangled thing comes out every week, every month," she said. "There's very little time to create a social consensus. That's the challenge for all of us that work in this space."
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