Groups Press FTC For Court Orders Against Doubleclick
Five public interest groups are pressing the Federal Trade Commission to immediately block online advertising firm DoubleClick Inc. from linking its offline and online data without consumers’ permission.
In addition to a federal court order against DoubleClick, the five are also asking the FTC to obtain court orders imposing similar prohibitions against other yet-to-be named online operations. The five groups are: the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the Consumer Action, Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the American Civil Liberties Union.
A joint statement released by the groups said that they didn’t trust the recent assurances of New York-based DoubleClick’s CEO Kevin O’Connor that the company would “not link personally identifiable information to anonymous user activity across Web sites.” The statement went on to say that the groups wanted “to make sure that the public is involved in [DoubleClick’s] efforts to design [its] privacy rules.”
Last month the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection launched a probe of DoubleClick’s practices after the five groups filed a formal complaint claiming that DoubleClick planned to deceptively track Internet users movements through the Web and then link that anonymous data with personal identities collected through its Abacus database of offline consumer purchasing and behavior data. The FTC said that DoubleClick is cooperating with its investigators.
