Doubleclick Privacy Policy Issue

DoubleClick Privacy Policy Issues

BIS/375: Supply Chain Information Management in Online Environments

April 25, 2011

James Boykin

DoubleClick Privacy Policy Issues

Conducting e-business comes with a separate set of rules, regulations, and policies companies must follow if they want to stay in business and conduct business legally. This paper will analyze some of the issues a company called DoubleClick is currently facing. DoubleClick is a leading provider of advertising on the World Wide Web. This paper will cover some of the legal issues, ethical issues, and regulatory issues that need to be addressed by the company. The first issue to analyze is legal issues.

Legal Issues

When one first looks at the case study used to write this paper some may say the company has done nothing wrong, however, once one starts analyzing the information one can see some legal issues exist such as privacy breach, profiling, and using cookies to track possible customers. The reason one could say that a privacy breach exists is because of how DoubleClick gets their information. The way the system works is DoubleClick assigns cookies to each person who clicks on a banner which in turn stores information about that person without them knowing. Once the DoubleClick servers have this information the company can begin by profiling each person who clicks on the ads because their personal information, without them knowing it, is related to the cookies. From this point DoubleClick servers build a database of a customer's likes and dislikes which will allow the servers to select advertising that may fit the customer's interest. By using the cookies to store information on individuals surfing the web DoubleClick is able to collect and store personal information. Some of the information may not be a problem when it is separate, but when it starts associating a name to an address or an address to a gender and reported to advertising companies then this is where there is a legal issue. At first one may not think that legal issues exist with the way DoubleClick conducts business, but when one sees how the information is collected and associated then this is where the legal issues start. Along with the legal issues, DoubleClick also has some ethical issues with the way they conduct business.

Ethical Issues

Most of the time if legal issues are involved then ethical issues will be included, DoubleClick is no different. One can see that three of the ethical issues facing DoubleClick are the company deceived consumers, the company committed privacy violations, and DoubleClick has their priorities wrong. The reason DoubleClick deceived their customers is the company led the consumer to believe that themselves and their