Privacy advocacy groups Junkbusters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Privacy International and the US Public Interest Research Group have written to the chief executive officers of DoubleClick Inc and Abacus Direct Inc, asking them to abandon their proposed merger. The authors of the letter argue that the merger: makes economic sense only if your intention is to link the 88+ million households and individuals identified in the Abacus Alliance database with the 30+ million cookies in the DoubleClick DART database. This would represent a surveillance machine of unprecedented breadth and depth, posing unacceptable privacy dangers to the public.
The activists says that the most important damage to privacy from a DoubleClick/Abacus merger would be a fundamental change in the nature of the internet. Instead of enjoying anonymity by default, net users would be silently identified unless they worked to protect their anonymity. It would also create an extraordinary incentive to build ever more detailed profiles of consumers on the internet, they write. Such a shift away from anonymity would greatly damage the medium.
DoubleClick told News.com that it hasn’t received any complaints about the pending merger, and that no consumer groups had contacted the company directly. President Kevin Ryan said: We don’t think it’s an issue. Yet the company did acknowledge the important role of consumer privacy concerns in its S-3 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 20. The effectiveness of our DART technology could be limited by any regulation or limitation in the collection or use of information regarding internet users, DoubleClick admitted. Since many of the limitations are still in the proposal stage, we cannot yet determine the full impact of these regulations on our business. If Junkbusters and its allies have their way, the impact will be substantial.
