ve moved online privacy issues to the forefront of public attention. Complaints against Double Click alleged that the company was unlawfully tracking the online activities of Internet users and combining surfing records with detailed personal profiles contained in a national marketing database. DoubleClick uses cookie technology to learn about the behavior of Internet users. DoubleClick's banner advertisements appear across the Internet on thousands of different kinds of sites. Whenever one views a DoubleClick banner ad -- this does not require clicking on an ad -- you are downloading an image from DoubleClick. With the download, DoubleClick also places a cookie on users' browsers. If, like the majority of Internet users worldwide, you already have a cookie on your browser, then DoubleClick knows where you downloaded one of their ads. By keeping track of users, DoubleClick is keeping a detailed record, often referred to as a profile, about what sites you visit. The most recent estimates indicate that DoubleClick serves ads and tracks users on more than 11,000 websites. In the four years of its existence, DoubleClick has collected roughly 100 million profiles of Internet users. According to Media Metrix, 45.8% of Internet users in the United States visited DoubleClick Network web sites in a single month (December 1998). In November 1999, DoubleClick completed a merger with market research firm Abacus Direct. Through the merger DoubleClick hoped to find out more about all Internet users in order to provide targeted one-to-one advertising. Prior to the merger, DoubleClick had been learning about Internet users through the use of cookie technology to collect personal information. Now DoubleClick has the be ability to correlate the existing information it has already accumulated from Internet users with the data in the Abacus database to personally identify information such as a names and addresses. For that reason, DoubleClick formed the...
