DoubleClick neatly covers that vulnerability like a set of thick leather boots. That has the groups concerned. They want the Federal Trade Commission to block or modify the multi-billion dollar proposal Google has on the table to acquire the company.

The three groups submitted a second supplement to the FTC, claiming that without safeguards for consumer information in place, that data could be abused by government or commercial entities.

Google’s current stance on privacy calls for a global standard based on the APEC framework. Melissa Ngo of EPIC blasted that proposal as “feeble” during a conference call.

Amina Fazlullah of US PIRG thinks information collection centralized in this merger, with Google in its dominant position, will affect the consumer’s position in the marketplace. Pricing and item availability could be impacted by what Google would know with its aggregated information.

“Content producers would be stuck with very few choices,” Fazlullah said of advertising opportunities for that blanket group of industries, should the deal go through.

CDD executive director Jeff Chester said the “overwhelming share of control” possible from the deal poses a “profound threat to privacy at home and abroad.”

That seems to be the case for Canada, today, as the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic filed a request for an audit of the merger with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Google has posted an early response to the FTC’s concerns at its Public Policy blog.

Pablo Chavez, Google Policy Counsel, said in the post his company is “glad to see” the FTC readying its town hall meeting about online advertising on November 1 and 2.

“Late last week we sent comments recommending that the Town Hall address two additional topics,” said Chavez. “We did so in response to the FTC’s request for suggested Town Hall topics in addition to the very timely questions it already plans to pursue.”

Google has asked the FTC to consider “the rapidly changing business landscape of online advertising, and the role it plays in providing free, accessible, user-friendly, and high-quality content to consumers,” and “the ways in which online advertising is contributing to a healthy and vibrant small business community.”

“Censorship!  Conspiracy!  Google’s gone evil!” is the cry that’s been taken up by some.  Others have suggested that Google is just trying to keep 21 world leaders from getting blown up.  And according to Rob Shilkin, a spokesman for Google Australia, they’re all wrong; the poor image quality is the result of a business arrangement gone bad.

“This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with APEC,” Shilkin told The Sydney Morning Herald.  “We’re re-sourcing our imagery for parts of Sydney as a result of a commercial issue with one of our suppliers, so some of the highest-res images have been temporarily replaced.”

And as fun as a conspiracy theory would be, Shilkin’s explanation seems quite possible.  After all, Google did about the best it could with a map of Washington, D.C. when restrictions were put in place there.

Also, we have yet to see how long the “fuzziness” over Google Maps’s representation of Sydney will last – this could all be resolved well before the APEC summit.

Sydney Gets Fuzzy Under Google Maps

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Australia 2007 Summit scheduled for September 2-9 in Sydney will bring in powerful political visitors like US President George W. Bush, protestors and their causes, and potentially the spectre of terrorism. We don’t envy the work Australian security professionals have to do in Sydney in preparation.

It’s been suggested by the Sydney Morning Herald that such preparations have extended to cyberspace, specifically that niche served by Google Maps and its satellite imagery. Views of Sydney from above have taken a turn for the blurrier, with the Herald hinting at national security requests resulting in Google taking down some of their best imagery:

Users of Google Maps Australia could previously zoom in for satellite views as close as 25 metres above the ground in much of Sydney, but now maps of the CBD are blurry even when zoomed out to 300 metres. Where individual people, tree branches and garbage bin lids were once visible, they can now only be seen as vague outlines of objects.

The high-resolution satellite images, which were introduced this year, appear to have been replaced by lower quality versions for the Sydney CBD only, and not for suburbs like Bondi Beach and Point Piper.

The article indicated how updates to imagery of Washington DC did not include much of the downtown area, where lower resolution images remain the norm.

Google has blamed the Sydney image downgrade "as a result of a commercial issue with a supplier." That’s a strange claim, as Google just happens to own Keyhole, a satellite image company that has mapped the world.