Former DoubleClick Exec Named Privacy Czar

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 ....

Comments

No, she sounds like a great choice.

[Welsh Dragon]

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.

why so speechless?

[jlusk4]

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.

Selective editorializing....

[Orne]

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?

RTFA

[phyxeld]

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!