Alvin:
DCLK and NETP are partners. But NETP supplies DCLK with the one truly anonymous, non invasive part of its total package. DCLK is not NETP's main partner.
There is no other connection between the two.
Read the WSJ article below.
Before that go to
netperceptions.com
to read it's policy on privacy.
Bottom line is that NETP deals in anonymous users: it bases its recommendations on a very fast statistical comparison of the choices of an anonymous user with a universe of anonymous users. It does not send cookies to the users and does not track the users web use.
While it may be true that some folks wondered if there was any connection between DCKL and NETP and got jittery because others might think there is a connection, there is no connection, and this should be apparent very soon.
NETP sponsors a web site on personalisation and also sponsors the Personalisation Summit. It will convene on 9th April and I am sure that NETP will take a lead in callinng for industry standards similar to its own.
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WSJ - This Friday article shows how far removed the privacy issue is from NETP:
February 18, 2000
DoubleClick Stands at Center
Of War Over Internet Privacy
By JASON FRY and MEGAN DOSCHER
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION
It was a week Internet-advertising firm DoubleClick Inc. would like to forget. But it may not get the chance -- a combination of bad spin and bad luck have stranded the New York company at ground zero in the privacy wars, and there's no telling when it will escape.
DoubleClick's troubles ultimately date back to last June, when the company agreed to acquire Abacus Direct Corp., a Colorado company that markets consumer-purchasing data to catalog firms. Abacus has the kind of data advertisers would kill for -- it can tell them, for example, what products consumers have previously purchased from more than 1,100 merchants.
By acquiring Abacus, DoubleClick could marry together two very useful, but different, sets of data: DoubleClick's ability to track surfers' interests and make sure they're seeing fresh ads and Abacus's information about actual consumers, what they have purchased and when they like to purchase it.
In many ways, it's an advertiser's dream for a new age -- but not a few privacy advocates see it as a nightmare.
This is basically how an Net-ad-delivery system like that used by DoubleClick (and others) works: The Net-ad company delivers ads to the multitude of Web sites on its ad network and tags those ads with an ID indicating which site was visited. This information is consolidated into a tiny text file (a "cookie") put on your hard drive by the company and then read by it -- even if you're on a different site. That way, the Net-ad company can see which ads you've seen and which sites you've visited, ensuring that it doesn't keep serving up stale ads for you to see.
But this system has clear limitations. For one, the company doesn't know anything about sites you visited that don't include its ads. And most importantly, it keeps track of you only as a number, not as a name. It may know some potentially interesting things about what you do as a Web surfer, but it doesn't know anything about you yourself. (The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition uses DoubleClick's technology, but isn't a part of its network of sites.)
That model passed muster with privacy advocates, who were satisfied that surfers' anonymity was being preserved. But now DoubleClick says it expects to be able to sell a service using Abacus' personal information by year's end. Privacy advocates are outraged, contending that DoubleClick has changed its mind and is preparing to violate the promises to preserve anonymity that it once made. (DoubleClick said this week that it has probably collected as many as 100,000 merged profiles so far, but hasn't sold a single banner ad based on offline information. Interestingly, the company also appears to be having trouble persuading e-commerce sites to pool their information into Abacus. The company didn't return a call for comment Friday.)
Regardless, the furor over the planned new program is building. DoubleClick faces six private lawsuits over its Web-privacy practices. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C., privacy-advocacy group, filed a complaint earlier this month with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which then began an inquiry of its own. The attorney general of New York is conducting an inquiry, and Michigan's attorney general warned the company that it will sue if DoubleClick doesn't change its ways. Attorneys general being attorneys general, other states will undoubtedly follow.
Investors, meanwhile, have fled the company's shares. DoubleClick did complete a secondary offering of 7.5 million shares Friday, with the shares pricing at $90.25 each. But the week has taken a toll: Its shares slid to $92.9219 on the Nasdaq Stock Market late Friday from $111.125 a week ago.
Some of this mess has been of DoubleClick's own making. But a lot of it can't be fairly blamed on the company -- it's the inevitable product of basic questions, and basic disagreements, about how Internet advertising and Internet marketing is going to work. The time was right for an explosion over those questions, and DoubleClick got burned.
On Monday, DoubleClick proudly unveiled a truly toothless set of initiatives it somehow thought would tamp down the anger. The centerpiece of those efforts is a public-service campaign via Web banners and newspaper ads in which DoubleClick is inviting Web users to visit the charmingly monikered www.privacychoices.org, which it billed as a resource for educating consumers about online privacy -- and as an opportunity for consumers to "opt out" of receiving DoubleClick cookies "with only two clicks." (The site does include links to a number of privacy groups that are vociferous opponents of DoubleClick's new policy.)
"It is DoubleClick's policy to only merge personally identifiable information with non-personally identifiable information for profiling, after providing clear notice and choice," DoubleClick President Kevin Ryan said in a statement this week.
Ah, but there's the rub. DoubleClick wants consumers and those launching inquiries to swallow that its privacychoices.org program constitutes "clear notice and choice."
Recent Tech Weeks
For a list of recent Tech Weeks, just press the search button. Or, search for Tech Weeks containing these words:
But consider: First of all, only a pretty sophisticated Web surfer can ever tell DoubleClick exists. If you hold your mouse over a banner ad served up by the company, you'll see a DoubleClick URL -- but if you click on that ad, you're taken to a site set up by the advertiser. Surfers will be served up random banner ads for privacychoices.org, but DoubleClick knows all too well that banner ads are almost never clicked on -- that's one reason it acquired Abacus in the first place. As for newspaper ads, here's betting that they attract even fewer click-throughs.
Privacy advocates argue that by any sane definition, a better reading of "clear notice and choice" would be to have an "opt-in" program for a program like Abacus' -- one in which consumers must specifically request that they receive personalized ads before online profiling can begin. In fact, those same privacy advocates are actively pushing legislation that would require use of the "opt-in" system.
When pressed on that this week, Mr. Ryan tried a couple of tacks. He noted that consumers won't receive any more ads than they did before, which completely ignored what people were angry about. He noted that the "opt-out" procedure is the accepted format in the direct-marketing industry, which was also a non-starter: First of all, people hate direct marketing, and second of all, that industry matured in an analog age before "opt-in" was feasible. "Opt-in" is feasible for today's Internet -- in fact there are Net advertisers employing it -- and DoubleClick's continuing to act like it doesn't exist won't change that.
But does "opt-in" make sense financially? In his best moments, Mr. Ryan addressed that point, though somewhat obliquely: Could the Web remain predominantly a free medium if advertisers were forced to change their ways? "We strongly believe that effective advertising is key to keeping the Internet free to consumers," Mr. Ryan said.
He may well be right. The Web delivers a flood of content of all stripes -- news, stock quotes, comic strips, baseball minutiae, and so forth -- that remains for the most part free. That content's free not because a bunch of CEOs hung out on slashdot.org and decided, "Dude, information's gotta be free," but because those CEOs think they'll get something in return: namely, money from your eyeballs looking at advertisements and your mouse clicking through those advertisements. That's the bargain, however implicitly it's often stated. If you accept that, you also have to accept that it's in the interest of those companies and their advertisers to figure out how to make Net ads as effective as possible. The more they know about you -- in every sense of the word -- the better their chances at doing so.
An "opt-in" system, meanwhile, is easy to call for, but somewhat less easy to put into play. What would the mechanism for such a system be? Advertisers like that DoubleClick is all but invisible to a Web surfer -- greater visibility for the Net-ad server is less visibility for the company that bought the ad. Would such a system make sense financially? If it didn't, what would that mean for content on the Web?
Finding a sensible path between consumers' desire for privacy and advertisers' need for information isn't going to be easy, and it's going to take input from Net-ad firms, government regulators, privacy advocates and consumers themselves. DoubleClick, if only for its own sake, needs to have a role in the debate. But if it wants to help find the answers, it needs to quit ducking the questions. |
