A week later, almost on cue, Makan Delrahim, the top antitrust official at the Department of Justice, suggested at a conference at Harvard that federal enforcers might start treating data privacy as a relevant issue in evaluating mergers.
In return for the data, according to the Journal, the hospital network, Ascension, will get free use of the new software, which Google intends to sell to other health care providers. That didnt stop the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services from announcing an investigation into the project on Wednesday.
Together, the Fitbit merger and Project Nightingale present an immediate challenge to Delrahims claim that antitrust regulators are ready to treat data collection as a competition issue. Since the late 1970s, the federal governments approach to merger review has essentially narrowed to the question of whether the reduction in competition caused by two companies combining will be bad for consumers.Bringing user data concerns into antitrust, as Delrahim suggested, would require asking a similar question: Will the reduction in competition lead to consumers having to accept inferior privacy protections?
Theyre going to scrutinize their data-driven acquisition of these smaller firms. Here you have this established firm thats already established a significant treasure trove of personal data.
These promises about what theyre going to do with data in the context of merger approvals deserve absolutely no weight, said Sally Hubbard, director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank.
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