| . | A suit has been filed by a Canadian
woman against Double click, a well known internet advertising company
for violation of personal privacy. The accusation is that the company is
collcting consumer's private information and selling it for commercial
gain.
Doubleclick is the internet's largest ad serving firm with a market capitalization of US $ 9.8 billion. It sells ads for hundreds of small and medium sized web sites and serves banners to over 11500 sites. In order to serve ads that are likely to be of interest to the visitors of a site, it tracks the web surfing habits such as the sites visited by the person, his and his location and delivers what it thinks are the relevant ads for him. For example if he has been surfing a series of sites having information on philosphy, it may serve an ad on "Books on Philosophy". In the same way if the person is visiting a series of porno sites, he may be served a condom ad!. Embarassing for some and informative for some. When visitors of some sites provide
detailed information about themselves in registering a free service, such
information may become available for determining the ad serving strategies.
In another case a Texas firm has asked a court to declare Yahoo's use of cookies a violation of the states "Anti-Stalking" laws. Yet again, it is essential for us to ponder that since there is a provision in most of the browsers to disable Cookies, it is debatable how this case can stand in a court of law. These cases are indicative of the extreme sensitiveness of the American society and it is a challenge for the law enforcers to balance the genuine public concers of a free society and the commercial considertaitons of E-Commerce. As long as technologically it
is possible to filter Cookies and use services such as "anonymizer" or
"zero knowledge" to hide identity, this "Privacy Invasion accusation"
is an unfair accusation and is an attempt to get protection for negligence
or ignorance.
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