New York-based online ad network DoubleClick faces a speed bump on its way to the proposed $800 million merger with Abacus Direct Corp.
The same privacy advocates who made Intel rethink its plans to put a serial number on its chips, Junkbusters and The Electronic Privacy Information Center, yesterday issued an open letter on the Internet saying the merger should be called off in the interest of consumers, or face appeals to the public and the government.
“The deal is an assault on Internet privacy,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told The Post. “Users don’t mind the ads, but they don’t want the ads looking back at them,” he said.
DoubleClick uses electronic cookies – hidden tags that can trace where you’ve been on the web – to target banner ads, ensuring they are served to the particular web surfer. Abacus Direct of Broomfield, Colo., compiles data on consumer purchases based on 1,100 catalogs. The combined company would be able to “synchronize” their data, which would “represent a surveillance machine of unprecedented breadth and depth, posing unacceptable privacy dangers to the public,” the letter said. The statement went on to envisage telemarketing calls being made to consumers’ homes based on their web surfing habits.
“I’m disappointed,” Kevin Ryan, president of DoubleClick, told The Post. “These people went straight to the media without even trying to find out about what we do. We haven’t had a single worried call from the public since we announced the deal last week. We encourage all our advertisers to link to us in the privacy policy on the bottom of their page, which allows people to opt out of our cookie system. Once you opt out you only receive random ads. Frankly we don’t want to serve ads to people who don’t want them, there’s nothing in it for us. Abacus is the same. It’s a cost to them when people throw catalogs in the trash unread.”
Tony White, CEO of Abacus Direct, who will sit on the board of the new company, says he, too, has had no complaints since the merger was announced. “We’re both in the business of making it easy to opt out. At Abacus we’d never send a catalog to someone who requests their name be removed from our database,” he said. The privacy groups also claim that the resulting large database could prove to be a tempting target for hackers – or for government subpoenas.
Once again the issue at stake is default positions.
Earlier this year Junkbusters and The Electronic Privacy Information Center forced Intel to break away from its plans to include a serial number in its Pentium III processor. The serial number was intended to improve e-commerce efficiency, but others feared it would let retailers track customers around the web. The chip manufacturing giant eventually agreed to set the default position to “off” so that the customer has to manually turn it on.