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Former DoubleClick Exec Named Privacy Czar

Posted by chrisd on from the no-shame-at-all dept.

tsu doh nimh writes "A former executive for banner ad giant DoubleClick has been selected to be the first ever privacy czar for the Department of Homeland Security, says this Washingtonpost.com story." Just leaves you speechless ....

7 of 570 comments (clear)

  1. No, she sounds like a great choice. by Welsh+Dragon · · Score: 5, Informative
    O'Connor Kelly sounds like a good choice for this position. DoubleClick was one of the most grevious privacy offenders on the internet, probably the absolute worst. They were so bad that even the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) got into the act. They're banner ads would abuse bugs in browsers to set cookies that would be able to track you from everywhere by using subdomains of base domains such as .co.uk (most browsers assumed you could set a parent if it was a high level domain like example.com or example.net just by counting the number of dots, but you can't register example.uk, only example.co.uk, so you could effectively set cookies for every purchasable domain) and other nasty tricks. They claimed that they didn't store personal data, but it was obvious that they were monitoring and corrolating everything they could, and the wide number of websites that used doubleclick meant they had a huge repository of data to mine.

    O'Connor Kelly came in after DoubleClick was shown to be, well, evil when it came to privacy, to clean things up. Many changes have occured at DoubleClick to fix some of the problems. Given the amount of data DoubleClick had and what they did with it, O'Connor Kelly should have an excellent idea of what abuses you can do when you have that sort of information.

    Hopefully she can step in and help prevent that sort of thing from happening at this level too.

  2. why so speechless? by jlusk4 · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the article:

    The privacy rights community generally views O'Connor Kelly as a consensus builder, but it is too soon to say how much influence she will have in protecting Americans' privacy rights, said Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

    "One of the things we liked (about her job) at DoubleClick was that she worked hard to build relationships with the privacy community and to vet their new policies with these groups," Schwartz said.

    Why would this leave you any more speechless than hiring Kevin Mitnick to do security for a large corporation?

    Get some balance in your outlook.

    John.

  3. Selective editorializing.... by Orne · · Score: 4, Informative

    In the cutting and pasting, the submitter clipped an important word from the opening paragraph...

    "The former privacy officer of Internet advertising giant DoubleClick will be the Department of Homeland Security's first privacy czar, Bush administration officials said. "

    Yes, she once worked for DoubleClick, but she only started AFTER the FTC sited them for privacy abuses. So she went in, cleaned them up, settled their lawsuits, and moved on. She now works for the Department of Commerce.

    So, she ran the privacy clean-up for DoubleClick, and now she's picked to do the same thing, monitoring privacy for the government's latest fad, Homeland Security. Is this a problem? Or is it only a problem because she was picked by a conservative?

  4. RTFA by phyxeld · · Score: 5, Informative
    As bad as slashdot has made it sound, after reading the article I think this is actually a good thing. From the text:
    O'Connor Kelly is well acquainted with the often bitter debate over balancing privacy rights with other interests. She joined DoubleClick in February 2000 after the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation into complaints that the company was improperly storing and sharing private user data. DoubleClick also was embroiled in similar investigations by 12 state attorneys general and several class-action lawsuits.

    DoubleClick settled most of those lawsuits, and created a division specializing in privacy compliance, which O'Connor Kelly ran.
    chrisd is either intentionally trying to stir shit up with sensational misrepresentation of facts, or he just skimmed the article before posting it and didn't bother to get the whole story. In either case, I think this is definitely worthy of an Update: on the front page, noting that the individual in question was responsible for cleaning up DoubleClick's privacy catastrophies, rather than causing them.

    I'm really glad I read the article on this post, because after only reading the slashdot version I had a very different opinion on the matter than I do now!
    --
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    Choose mnemonic identifiers. If you can't remember what mnemonic means, you've got a problem. - Larry Wall
  5. Re:Doh! by donutello · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's just sad. Is this the same guy who was responsible for the plan to merge all of DoubleClick's databases together?

    No, this is the gal who joined DoubleClick after they were caught by the FTC and worked to get it into compliance, vetting new policy with privacy groups. Privacy groups actually like this choice.

    --
    Mmmm.. Donuts
  6. She's an interesting choice at the least... by ralico · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here is a quick bio. She's 34, so she's a young woman in what is still seems very much an old white man's game. Given her acedemic credentials, and where she is today, she's an overachiever. This may be a very good thing if she is has enough moral backbone to stave off corrupting special interests.
    Call me cynical and sterotyping, but I think this is better than having yet another old, corrupt white guy in someones pocket.

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    SCO to Hell
  7. A bit of topic but... by Jarden · · Score: 3, Informative

    I just found this page which lets you opt-out of doubleclick storing personal cookie info about you. Most of us probably already block doubleclick cookies but maybe someone will find it useful.