Slashdot Mirror
DoubleClick Taken to Court
- Friday, January 28, 2 p.m. US EST
Tuesday USA Today reporter Will Rodger wrote about DoubleClick. We linked to his story here. Wednesday afternoon a DoubleClick Corporate Communications person* called Andover.net Corporate Communications VP Janet Holian and asked her to remove our story and the link to USA Today.
Janet passed the problem to me, since Andover has a very strict policy prohibiting Andover corporate people from interfering in editorial decisions.
I listened politely to the DoubleClick person, who told me USA Today's story was innacurate and we were wrong to link to it, and how she was calling journalists all over the country to tell them that the information in it was false and should not be relied upon. Then she requested that we pull the Slashdot story that linked to the USA Today story. No direct threats were made, but the words "refer this to our legal department" were said.
I said no, we couldn't and wouldn't pull the story.
Next move: I called USA Today. These guys are good fact-checkers. They pointed me at some of DoubleClick's own press releases and privacy policy pages, most of which had already been referenced by Slashdot in this story back in October, 1999.
An Open Offer
I offered DoubleClick's Corporate Communications person a chance to state their side of the story here, on Slashdot. I promised to run whatever they sent verbatim. I have received nothing from them so far. I called DoubleClick and reiterated the offer before writing this. Still nothing, not even an e-mail saying what information they feel is incorrect in any of the stories written about them here, in USA Today or in other media.
At this point, it's DoubleClick's move. Perhaps, eventually, they'll post something on their Press Release page. We'll keep an eye on it in case they do.
* I left out the name of the DoubleClick Corporate Communications person purely as a personal courtesy. She is a very nice woman in a bad position, trying to do a very tough job - which, right now, could probably best be described as "frantic damage control."
Fuck this. I'm a lawyer, and it chafes my ass to see this godman stupid point made over and over again. Let me ask you this question: How many lawsuits do you think you saw in the Soviet Union?
I mean it. Lawsuits are a sign of freedom. They're a sign that the government has decided to leave as much as possible to the free market and the law of contract and tort, and not to come in with a big wet fucking nanny agency. Which of course still generates work for lawyers through a regulatory practice, but less open and less honest work.
Would you rather Big Fucking Brother came in and spent fifty fucking years drawing up a piece of legislation precisely specifiyng what information could and couldn't be collected? All stuffed with pork, and with a big-ass federal agency to enforce it? Or would you rather this was decided in terms of general principles of tort and property, in an open court?
Well, I've got news for you, dickhead, the second method involves lawsuits. And those lawsuits have to be argued by lawyers. And that means that lawyers get rich. Check out the alternative any time you grudge us our big fucken' payoff. We don't get stock options, you know.
If the woman has a case, she will win. If she's whining like a bitch, she won't. End of. It's like a free market, only it's better than a free market because the smartest lawyer with the best argument always wins. How many other industries are there where the best product always wins? Not software.
Lawsuits are freedom. That's why we have so many in America, and they have so many government agencies in Europe.
AC posting allows an educated professional like me to swear like a thug in public. I say fucken keep it.
For me, it's more than not wanting them tracking me. I don't want to support a company that tracks people. That's why I installed the Internet Junkbuster, and I have it set to block anything from doubelick.net.
The Internet Junkbuster is a non-caching proxy that you run on your local computer. You tell it URL's to block and sites that you want to allow cookies from. It's really great. I can deny ads from doubleclick and any other company, as well as anything else I feel like blocking. It supports regexes for those that want them. I can allow cookies from Slashdot and deny them from everyone else.
As with the US crypto export laws,
:) The
as with the EU privacy regulations
(where companies are not allowed to maintain
databases of customers or use such information for
focused marketing) and Texas's on again, off again
status as far as selling DMV information to
outside parties (Public Data)
and E-Banking (ebanking.com (luxembourg)),
and countless internet casinos and porn sites,
these regulations will have an unintended
consequence -- drive these businesses offshore.
No longer does the US and EU have a monopoly
on high-speed internet connectivity; it's possible
for any business selling valuable data illegal
in the US/EU to colocate a machine in a
less-regulated country, such as Anguilla, or
Costa Rica, or many others, employ a few locals
to maintain it, and pay admittedly higher rates
for satellite or undersea cable connectivity.
In exchange, pay lower or no taxes, have no
government interference in your business, etc.
Sure, this only makes sense for certain kinds of
data, data for which people are willing to pay
money, but that's the only interesting data,
anyway. When a T1 costs $100k/month, running
an online gambling site making $3m/month is a
lot better business than letting people
leech mp3s.
In the end, it's futile to try to restrict
businesses like this; all doubleclick would need
to do is contract with an offshore tracking
company, connected to the net over a 128kbps
satellite link, something they could set up
for $20k/month, and put that machine anywhere
in the world -- even on the back of a boat.
If they need help, they should email me -- I've
lived in Anguilla, the erstwhile datahaven, and
know a thing or two about such things
situation is only getting better, as far as
offshore colocation goes, as the major governments
get more and more restrictive and bandwidth
becomes more widely distributed -- in a few years,
every country in Africa will have fiber-optic
connectivity via redundant SONET, and that
gives the prospective colocator a lot of
potentially friendly and cash-starved countries
to negotiate with who wouldn't care about
the difference between online advertising and
online pornography.
The net views regulation as damage and routes
around it -- cypherpunks.
You know where to get the source. Do anything you want when Doubleclick comes sniffing around looking for its cookie. Have fun, play tricks on Doubleclick, whatever you want.
Maybe there should be a contest to come up with the best anti-tracking hack for Mozilla.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I say revoke their corporate charter, liquidate all corporate assests, fine the corporate officers and anyone else the law allows, and distribute the proceeds to everyone who was tracked or had their privacy compromised. But then, that's my opinion of what should happen to a lot of corporations.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
- In the course of delivering an ad to you, DoubleClick does not collect any personally-identifiable information about you, such as your name, address, phone number or email address. DoubleClick does, however, collect non-personally identifiable information about you, such as the server your computer is logged onto, your browser type...
But they go on to say- However, as described in "Abacus Alliance" and "Information Collected by DoubleClick's Web Sites" below, non-personally identifiable information collected by DoubleClick in the course of ad delivery can be associated with a user's personally identifiable information if that user has agreed to receive personally-tailored ads.
Does anyone know which sites are a part of the "Abacus Alliance" and whether those sites explicitely ask your permission first? (eg. big flashing letters that say WE ARE WATCHING YOU! ?)Someone else posted this a while back, but here's what I did.. very simple.
/etc/hosts (or in windows, find the "hosts" file under your windows directory):
Add this to
127.0.0.1 www.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.preferences.com
127.0.0.1 ad.washingtonpost.com
127.0.0.1 adbot.theonion.com
127.0.0.1 adpick.switchboard.com
127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ads.i33.com
127.0.0.1 ads.infospace.com
127.0.0.1 ads.msn.com
127.0.0.1 ads.switchboard.com
127.0.0.1 ads.washingtonpost.com
That removes quite a lot of ads, and all of doubleclick.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This is all well and good, but don't the Pentium IIIs have a "thumbprint" that allows for them to see what we're doing?
You got a network card in your system? That has a "thumbprint" too. The MAC address.
You got any commercial software (e.g., Windows) on your system that you had to enter a software key to use? There's another "thumbprint" for you.
How about a static IP address? Ever time you send a network request, you're identifying yourself.
You think you're safe because you have a dynamic address? Do you at least always call the same ISP at the same phone number? You'll always be getting the same range of IP numbers, then. You and maybe a few dozen or hundred more people. That is almost as good as a unique personal ID, as far as demographics go.
Fact of the matter is, tracking a computer is not that hard to do. If you ever give out any personal information at all (name, email, phone number, ZIP code), that can be combined with any of the above to nail down exactly who you are.
I think Scott McNeally's right on this one. Privacy on the Internet is dead.
The only way to improve things would be for the government to step in and make such unauthorized tracking illegal, with hefty fines for violators. You could even do some good by donating said fines to the EFF.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Hers my cookie. Dialup with dynamic i/p, so I don't mind.
.doubleclick.net TRUE / FALSE 1920499140 id a486b3cd
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.