DoubleClick Inc.- An Invasion of Privacy
1. Tracking the web habits– DoubleClick has been a leading provider of intelligent Internet banner
advertising for publishers and marketers. Its software tool DART, comprised of tools, which collected,
analyzed and optimized the online ads and their delivery. DoubleClick stored cookies on the user’s hard
drives when he or she visited the site for the first time and whenever the viewers clicked on the
banners, it added the fact to individual dossiers with the help of those cookies. The cookie would help
uniquely identify DART’s user profiles, thus creating and fixing a non-identifiable profile to the
computer account on which, it was stored in. For the users accessing the webpage again DART’s user
profile database would recognize the user’s cookie file and unique number, and retrieve the IP address,
country domain, company, browser and operating system. Although personally DoubleClick did not
collect identifiable information, there were some cases when the user would voluntarily provide the
personal information in response to an ad. Hence, DoubleClick was aware of the user’s web habits but
not of the user’s identity barring a few cases1.
2. Value to advertising clients– DoubleClick’s DART was a web-based service offering which would
Ajinkya Sirsikar
913747268
ISYS-850
Lutfus Sayeed
