The Internet's largest advertising firm has said it will continue tracking consumers by name and address, but it would launch an ad campaign to raise awareness that users could opt out of such data-gathering.
DoubleClick's campaign is part of a "five-point privacy initiative" designed to quell a rising backlash against the New York-based company, which recently began tying Internet users' surfing habits to their names after insisting for years that it collected online data only anonymously.
Because DoubleClick is so large and influential, privacy advocates say its new tactic is likely to be followed by others, and represents a major threat to anonymity on the Net.
DoubleClick, which has been targeted with lawsuits and complaints to regulators in recent weeks, said it would also appoint a "chief privacy officer" and hire PricewaterhouseCoopers to perform periodic audits of its data collecting. The company maintains that it is only interested in making advertising more relevant for Internet users.
Privacy advocates said the DoubleClick campaign is inadequate. Jason Catlett, president of the watchdog group Junkbusters.org, called the new campaign "window dressing on their previous position, which is that they're going to profile as much as they feel like unless people opt out".
But Mr Kevin Ryan, president of DoubleClick, called it an "unprecedented Internet privacy education campaign", and said the company wished to be seen as a leader in allowing consumers to control how much data was collected from them.
Through the awareness campaign, DoubleClick aims to reach most Internet users with more than 50 million ads over the next few months, Mr Ryan said. The ads will point consumers to a new website, www.privacychoices.org, where they can learn more about how the company gathers data, and opt out of such profiling if they choose.
The privacy dispute stems from a new DoubleClick program called Abacus Online, in which the company is merging consumers' shopping habits and Webviewing preferences on the Internet with a giant offline database containing records on 80 million households culled from catalogue purchases and other sources.
DoubleClick executives say consumers aren't affected by the new program unless they provide their name and addresses to participating websites. But the company has declined to name those sites. DoubleClick crafted its ad campaign to silence critics who complained that few Internet users were even aware of DoubleClick, let alone its new data gathering scheme.
Privacy advocates said DoubleClick had still not addressed more fundamental concerns, including that it doesn't allow Internet users access to data collected from them.
