Privacy groups demand second look at merger

The Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. PIRG called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to take a second look at its decision to approve a marketing corporation merger.

The groups told the FTC that the $2.3 billion merger of direct marketing company Alliance Data Systems with Conversant — a digital marketing company formerly known as ValueClick —  “raises serious privacy concerns,” and needs to be readdressed.

{mosads}“The commission’s approval of this transaction without appropriate safeguards directly undermines its role as the country’s chief privacy regulator,” they say in a letter.

Allowing the merger to go through, they added, amounted to “expanded commercial surveillance of the American people.”

In addition to opposing the general trend of consolidation among “data brokers” — the companies that track people’s data in order to target advertising — the deal could violate a system to protect European citizens’ data, combine offline and online data sets and give the company more power to track consumers, the groups worries.

They called for the FTC to launch a formal review of consolidation among companies dealing with “big data,” which are able to analyze vast amounts of information about people.

In September, the agency approved the merger. The companies said at the time that the deal would allow their clients to more effectively market to their customers.

The FTC has increased its analysis of data brokers and big data in recent months, as the issue has slowly made its way into the mainstream. 

In May, the agency called for new laws to better protect people from the growing amounts of data held by the companies.