DoubleClick Settles Privacy Investigation

guttentag writes "DoubleClick ended the 30-month probe into its business practices with an agreement to pay $450,000 for the investigative costs of the states and 'consumer education.' It also agreed to allow a third-party to audit it for compliance with its privacy policy for four years and give individuals access to their profiles. However, it will continue to use to track users with cookies. The Washington Post also has an article, but it is conspicuously missing the standard disclosure statement that informs readers of The Post's business relationship with DoubleClick." Well, let me be sure to point out then that Slashdot also serves Doubleclick ads. If you recall, this all started when Doubleclick merged with a database company and announced plans to merge its online and offline databases.

Comments

Bank of America

[Anonymous Coward]

Doubleclick will sell to anyone, and I can't believe that some people buy into it. For example, I have an account with Bank Of America, and one day while I was checking my account balances I noticed that mozilla was loading something from doubleclick. I looked at the page and there were no ads to be seen. I checked out the HTML source and sure enough they were loading a 1x1 transparent gif from doubleclick. Now, could someone please explain to me why Bank of America would be interested in doing that? The only possible reason they could be doing this is:

1) Doubleclick is paying them an assload of money to do it.
2) BOA is receiving browsing profiles for their banking customers.

Those are the only possible benefits I can see from this whole thing. Any comments?

Ironic..

[Frank of Earth]

Slashdot also serves Doubleclick ads

Yeah, I know. I find it really amusing when the topic is the typical MS bashing post and there is a huge ad for Visual Studio.net