Google to Acquire Choicepoint
Mountain View, CA., April 1 /PRNewswire/ — Google today announced plans to acquire Alpharetta, GA based Choicepoint. Choicepoint, 2005 winner of the “Lifetime Acheivement” Big Brother award, is a data warehouser which collects information on everyone it possibly can, and re-sells it widely. “Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said “We’re always on the look-out for large databases that we can use to better serve our customers. We used to have access to Choicepoint’s data, but the “due diligence” people they kept sending would burst into flames the minute they hit our “no evil” barrier. After seven or eight of those, we couldn’t believe it was coincidence any longer, so we just bought them.”
Choicepoint CEO Derek Smith (according to the merged database, the two are 17th cousins, three times removed) said “Our missions are remarkably similar. We bring in every scrap of data we can, and never throw anything away.”
“I fully support the synergies and customer choice made possible by the merger,’ said Chris Hoofnagle, privacy advocate and newly-appointed director of privacy oversight for the program. ‘The merger will bring value to consumers and shareholders, and it has pre-approval from Truste.’
The move is expected to substantially improve Google’s relationship with governments around the world.
Oh, my. This is this is this is….scary.
Next up: Google buys Diebold and Election Systems & Software?
Or, I’ve been had…
btw, worth reiterating — this wasn’t the bad “google buys X” parody I was complaining about in my link-blog posting. This one, by comparison, is quite funny — and worryingly plausible IMO!
Thanks Jason!
I actually think its much more likely that Google would buy Lexis/Nexis (for the legal and news databases) or Axciom, who have a much more marketing focus in their use of data. But Choicepoint has the name recognition, and it may become an EC April Fool’s tradition for them to be involved. 🙂