by Fred Hume

Seeing as I've had a couple of inquires from some of you about "DoubleClick," I thought I'd pass along some info about them. For those of you who don't know what "DoubleClick" is, I'll explain. DoubleClick is an Internet company that owns approximately 50% of the advertising banners you see on Web pages. Every time you click on one of their banners, they drop a "cookie" (a small piece of information that a Web site puts on your hard drive). The cookie contains a tracking number and can track every page you visit and what you see. This information is added to a database.

If you fill out and submit a form from one of DoubleClick's ads, the information in the form is sent back to them along with the "cookie." They now have a name, address, and an e-mail ID to go with the tracking number. DoubleClick sells this info to companies that target your interests for their Web advertising.

The issue here is not will they harm your PC, because they won't. But they are tracking your movements across the Internet without your knowledge, and selling the information they gather. This is the same type of issue that popped up with Real Jukebox and the x-mas "Snowballfight" exec. These were also feeding information back to their creators without users' knowledge.

DoubleClick says on its homepage that you can "opt-out" of their collecting information about you. The problem with that is if you don't know it's happening, or who's doing it, how are you going to know to opt-out? And to whom? Why should the onus fall on the end user? If you want this service, you should be asked to opt-in.

There are a couple of ways to deal with this issue. One way, of course, is to use the opt-out feature. The problem with this is that when you opt-out, they give you another cookie that says you opted-out. Well, cookies expire after a few weeks or months, what then? Guess you'll have to do it again . . . and again . . . and again.

A second way to deal with this is to delete the contents of your cookies folder, except for application .dat files in windows for Internet Explorer users and cookies.txt for Netscape users. This will not cause any harm to your PC. You can also set your browsers to warn you before accepting a cookie (which can be a nuisance), or you can run a cookie killer program. I use Luckman's Anonymous Cookie. It's free, and it does its own setup. Load it and forget it. It's on the Internet if you want it. Any search engine can find it for you.

It's time for the government or the FTC to step up and make some rules about what is legal and what is not on the Internet. But until that happens, the responsibility for protecting your personal information is going to fall on you. Protect yourself.

The first link in the text below will take you to the real page for the story that is right below it. The second link will take you to related info and provide you with a link to do the "OPT-OUT" of "DoubleClick" that is mentioned in the article.

http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2000-2/0207m.html#item1

"Critics Press Legal Assault on Tracking of Web Users" New York Times (02/07/00) P. C1; Tedeschi, Bob.

http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/02/cyber/commerce/07commerce.html