• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, December 13, 2007

Turning up the heat on Google, a Republican member of Congress Wednesday sent Google CEO Eric Schmidt a letter demanding answers to a host of detailed questions about the company's privacy policy.

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), senior Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in the letter that he sought the information to "better understand the privacy and consumer protection implications" of the pending Google-DoubleClick merger.

What followed were 24 questions (many with multiple parts) totaling around 1,100 words, in which Barton asked for clarification of everything from why Google collected information about people's search queries to whether the company was able to determine users' age, gender and ethnicity based on IP addresses.

The letter was apparently sparked by Google's having "rebuffed" attempts by Barton's staff to visit the Mountain View, Calif. headquarters. After initially agreeing to a visit, Google executives and Barton weren't able to pick a date. "On November 20, I wrote Google corporate officials to request that two counsels from the House Energy and Commerce Committee staff be permitted to visit your California headquarters offices, at Committee expense," he wrote. "Google officials with whom we spoke deemed the dates inconvenient, and the request was denied. Since then, all efforts to reach a mutually agreeable time have been rebuffed, and it begins to seem that no date for a visit is sufficiently convenient to Google."

A Google spokesman said the letter was surprising because company representatives had recently met with Barton, and were in communication with his office about scheduling another meeting.

Barton has previously raised questions about the privacy implications of the merger. "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," he said in a statement last month.

The FTC is currently considering whether to approve the deal (see related story, FTC Chair's Potential Bias on Google-DoubleClick Deal Questioned), but even if the agency clears the merger, Congress still could pass legislation that would curtail Google's ability to harness information about consumers.

One of the biggest concerns of privacy advocates is that Google will create detailed profiles of users by combining its records of users' IP addresses and search queries with DoubleClick records about which Web sites users visit.

While the questions in yesterday's letter cover a lot of ground, Barton seemed especially interested in Google's policy about storing IP addresses. One question asks Google to definitively state whether the company considers an IP address "personal information."

Google's privacy policy states that the company doesn't collect personal information from users without their permission. But like many other search companies, Google retains information not just about search queries, but also the IP addresses those queries originated from.

While online ad companies often say IP addresses are not "personally identifiable," privacy advocates disagree, arguing that people's identity can be discerned from their IP addresses.

"The industry is holding on to an early Internet-era fiction that personally identifiable information is solely your name and social security number and street address," said Jeff Chester, founder and executive director of the privacy group Center for Digital Democracy. He added that IP addresses should be considered personally identifiable information because they can be used to identify and build profiles of users.