The likely Republican presidential nominee looks unfavorably (Financial Times) on the Microsoft antitrust suit. By sheer coincidence, he did this at a campaign stop in Washington state.
The Senator from Microsoft, Slade Gorton, said (and wasn’t contradicted by Bush), “I don’t think a Bush administration would have (sued) in the first place.”
Needless to say, many of the tech executives in Silicon Valley who favored the suit now support Bush for president. If Microsoft uses its monopoly to put them out of business they’ll surely have no complaints.
DoubleClick Does Damage Control
It’s finally sinking in at DoubleClick HQ that its new business model is creating real problems. The company announced that it will postpone (Reuters), at least for the time being, its plan to link personally identifiable information with Web browsing databases.
Here’s a statement from Kevin O’Connor, the company’s CEO, that I just received. Among other things, he says: “I made a mistake by planning to merge names with anonymous user activity across Web sites in the absence of government and industry privacy standards.”
This is the smartest thing DoubleClick has done in quite a while. The company has been remarkably tone-deaf to public concerns about its methods and evolving view of customer privacy.
Meanwhile, DoubleClick was fending off new queries Thursday about yet another privacy concern. Whether by accident or design — accident seems to be the likeliest explanation at this point — sensitive customer data from Intuit’s Web site was leaking out (News.com) to DoubleClick’s advertising partners.
Was DoubleClick’s Response Misleading?
You decide. In a response to a recent column, DoubleClick claimed it didn’t say it would never connect personally identifiable information, such as names and addresses, with the Web-browsing “clickstream” data the company and its partners are collecting.
In an all-too-cursory look at some databases I didn’t spot anything to contradict this assertion — even though I believed the company had strongly implied it wouldn’t do this based on a Forbes Magazine article I cited– and I said so in yesterday’s eJournal.
I obviously do not have career potential as a research librarian.
Tara Calishain, an alert and industrious reader of this column, found otherwise. Here are several of the instances she uncovered where DoubleClick specifically appears to have said what it now claims not to have said:
“‘We don’t ask for personal information, and we’d never associate a user’s name with a cookie,” (DoubleClick co-founder Kevin) O’Connor said. And even though DoubleClick is capable of sorting through all the cookies collected at those 200 sites, it is not doing that kind of clustering, he said.
–Seattle Times, 08/07/1998David Rosenblatt, a DoubleClick vice president, conceded that the company has the “physical ability to generate those [central] reports,” but noted that “we absolutely do not and never will.” Moreover, Rosenblatt said, the company does not attach a person’s name or other identifying information to cookies it issues, calling the process “completely anonymous.””
—News.com article, August. 20, 1999
I’ve asked DoubleClick for a comment on these quotes. So far, no response — but then again, the company has been pretty busy today.