Double Click Inc

DoubleClick INC. had the ability to determine and track a person's identity through the use of "cookies" and other databases. Web users name and address is tracked as hey move from one Website to the next. This practice is called profiling, which gives marketers the ability to know the household, and in many cases the identity, of the person visiting any of DoubleClick's Websites using their ad-tracking "cookies".

DoubleClick's DART technology is valuable to advertising clients because they can use it to specifically target consumers. It performed targeting, reporting and inventory management, allowing sites to manage all or some of their ad serving and reporting functions through DoubleClick's servers. Advertising clients benefited from this by building life long relationships with their customers through the personalization of advertising messages.

The advantage of having Abacus is that on behalf of Internet retailers and advertisers, they would use additional statistical modeling techniques to identify those online consumers in the Abacus Online database who would most likely be interested in a particular product or service. The threats posed to privacy would be that the DART technology would be come to invasive and consumers who did not want to be tracked had no other option.

DoubleClisk's campaigned to educate consumers about online privacy and its privacy statement which stated the DoubleClick did not collect any personally-identifiable information about its users such as name, address, phone number or email address. It did collect non-personally identifiable information such as the server the user's computer was logged on to, user's browser type, and weather the user responded to the ad delivered. However, non-personally identifiable information could be associated with personally identifiable information if the user agreed to disclose their information. If a user agreed to voluntarily provide information they would receive notice.

DoubleClick's privacy policy was adequate and appropriate for the type of business they do, but not necessarily for its own business. This consumer backlash hurt DoubleClick's business because it became more difficulty for them to perform that they offered to advertisers, tailoring ads to specific customers. This resulted in a drop in the companies stock and a drop in business.