NET PRIVACY
In the world of data mining, Kevin O'Connor just hit the mother lode. The chair and CEO of online advertising firm DoubleClick (www.doubleclick.net) oversaw his company's recent acquisition of Abacus Direct, creating one of the industry's dominant online advertising and marketing businesses. The teaming of DoubleClick, which records consumer wanderings and creates targeted advertising across more than 1,400 sites, and Abacus, which stockpiles data on more than 2 billion consumer purchases, gives O'Connor's company unmatched power to tailor Net advertising to individual customers' tastes.
"There's no shortage of data," O'Connor says. "The problem is turning data into knowledge."
The controversy over the deal comes from the specter of Big Brother watching your every online move. Privacy advocates worry that DoubleClick (which also gobbled up rival NetGravity) is quietly building a surveillance machine with unprecedented reach into users' personal lives - who they are, where they surf, and what they buy.
O'Connor is quick to point out that DoubleClick lets consumers opt out of its databases by requesting removal of their names and has a disclosure policy about what it does with data once it is collected.
But opponents say Web marketers such as DoubleClick should track only consumers who opt in, or voluntarily submit to being profiled. O'Connor counters that consumers are willing to exchange data for value. "Privacy is absolutely a huge, huge priority for us," he says. "Our belief is that you educate people."
Still, some look at DoubleClick and wonder whether Orwell had it wrong. In the Net economy, Big Brother isn't simply watching - he's selling.
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