DoubleClick DoublesBack

rjamestaylor was the first to write to us about the news that DoubleClick is reversing its decision to cross-reference individuals' information with their online habits. There's a great quote from Kevin O'Connor, DoubleClick's chief executive, who said in a statement, "I made a mistake by planning to merge names with anonymous user activity across Web sites in the absence of government and industry privacy standards." Privacy Advocates have won this battle, but we need to remain vigilant against future scenarios like what DoubleClick wanted to do. Moreover, look for what you can do to help establish legal consumer privacy laws where you live.

Comments

Not necessarily permanent

[Romen]

According to this Wired article, they plan to wait until there are more govenment and industry privacy standards. This means that once someone develops some self-serving standard, DoubleClick will consider it a-ok to follow that, and track everything you do again. Unfortunatley, the Yahoo article doesn't mention this.

I feel that we should be careful of DC's promises not to abuse our privacy, as they have not shown themseleves to be the most trustworthy business in that regard. We also should not blindly assume than any 'industry standard' for privacy will agree with the beliefs of people here on slashdot.


Sam TH

Cookies and Banners

[akey]

This is great news, but the fact is, that it can be stopped already. The Internet Junkbuster does a fantastic job of filtering out banner ads, and can be used to filter cookies as well. DoubleClick (and others) can try to track me as much as they like, but since I have the IJB set up to reject all cookies that I haven't explicitly allowed, they're going to have a hard time doing so.

Suspicions

[elthia]

Actually, I saw some of what happened as a result of this.

I decided I didn't want anything to do with DoubleClick. I got a list of all of their 'associates' - the people who run their ads, give them info, etc. It's a disappointing list, just about _everyone_ uses DoubleClick. I almost stopped shopping online completely. However, I also sent letters to the people I would have otherwise shopped at. One example:

I was looking for a particular skirt, to replace one which had been damaged beyond repair. I couldn't find it until I went to a site called catalogcity. But they used doubleclick. I sent them a letter, telling them how happy I was to have found the skirt, but that I would not buy it until either DoubleClick backed out of their current invasive policy or this site stopped using DoubleClick. I told them that, while I use cookies on a regular basis, and am perfectly fine with targeted ads, I don't approve of anyone tying that in with what my income is, or my real address, or other such personal info.

I received a very polite, well-written response, saying that they were unhappy with it too, and that, for now, they were removing the doubleclick integration from their site - not to be reinstated until Doubleclick backed away from that policy.

This was a pleasant surprise, as I had expected no reply at all - the usual response to letters indicating a single lost sale is 'oh well, we've got plenty of happy customers, this one must be a fluke'.

It appears that catalogcity wasn't the only one, however. UserFriendly, Advance Internet (who run a number of the 'state' sites, like nj.com, oregonlive.com, and (I think) alabama.com), and a few others I spoke with were all looking for new adservers, or simply disabling doubleclick entirely for the duration of this mess.

Somehow, I don't think this is some sort of sneaky move. Doubleclick was feeling the heat, from consumers and from its affiliates, in a major way. I know for a fact that Advance, for example, generated a _lot_ of advertising for them (we're talking millions of pageviews a day, and that's just in ONE of the physical sites). When your major customers start complaining about something, you listen or you go under. The thing that makes me happy is that the major customers of DoubleClick were on the ball and listening well enough to put the heat on in the first place.

-Elthia