Privacy Advocates Take on Doubleclick

WRITE-UP of case 17.1:

Privacy Advocates Take on DoubleClick

GI 610 E-commerce

Prepared by

Iryna Zaytseva

The merge of a leading Internet advertising company DoubleClick Inc. and a catalogue marketer Abacus Direct in 1999 started the wave of official complaints and lawsuits against the company’s information collection practices. Thus, EPIC blamed DoubleClick for unlawful “tracking the online activities of Internet users (through the placement of cookies) and combining surfing records with detailed personal profiles contained in a national marketing database”. They also asked the Federal Trade Commission to initiate an investigation of its use of cookies practices and order DoubleClick to pay a civil penalty equal to fifty percent (50%) of the revenues it obtained as a result of these practices (“EPIC’s complaint”, February 10, 2000).

Thus, having got free access to off-line personalized database of Abacus Direct DoubleClick could significantly improve its work with target advertising and marketing research. On the one hand, this event made advertising more efficient and more selective which is to the user’s benefit – he will not be overloaded by irrelevant to his habits and interests information. On the other hand, all the personal data was collected without the user’s consent which infringes the right for privacy that was exactly the subject of the lawsuits against DoubleClick. However, the US legislation was not ready to deal with such cases as “existing laws were not necessarily enacted to deal with the Internet and Internet commerce” (“DoubleClick settlement”, April 8, 2002).

Another potential danger seen by the analysts in the situation with the lawsuits against DoubleClick was the possible negative consequences for other businesses in this field after DoubleClick had paid legal fees and compensations required by the plaintiffs. Since then any firm may face similar problems if “DoubleClick's $1.8 million settlement is seen as an...