Double Click

The withdrawal of the proposed DoubleClick/Abacus product aided consumer privacy and was in the best long-term interests of the Internet as a market.

Data-mining and profiling gives marketers the ability to know the household and in many cases the precise identity of the person visiting any of the sites that uses DoubleClick’s ad-tracking “cookies”. By merging with Abacus, DoubleClick can now correlate the Abacus database of names and personal information with people’s Internet activities.

Proponents of this will argue that this opens up the ability to target the Internet consumer with ads and websites that pertain to their recent activity and interests, creating a long-tail effect. Pinpointing targeting and real time, actionable reports all add up to increasing return on investments. However, this also creates increased junk mail and SPAM as well as Phishing scams that can now target certain demographics and income classes that would not otherwise be known.

Another argument for the merger is that this is inevitable as the Internet and ecommerce becomes more commonplace. While this is true, it certainly opens up people to one of the biggest threats of profiling with personal information, identity theft. When compared to conventional identity theft the victims are unaware until its too late.

DoubleClick tries to counter this threat with engaging PriceWaterhouseCoopers to perform periodic privacy audits and doing business with online US publishers that have privacy policies. They challenged other Internet players to adopt similarly strong privacy policies. This is not enough, as often the data is gathered from many places and by other third party services, making it very difficult to police all companies collating data. Not many sites do a great job of explaining how information is tracked, used, and disclosed either. Studies have indicated that consumers who may be concerned about privacy usually are not going to stop surfing long enough to read a long...