“Don’t be evil.” That’s Google’s informal corporate motto, which they proudly advertise. Like a lot of companies started by young innovators, they try to uphold the idealism of their founders, and though they may have grown to become a multi-billion dollar corporate giant, they’re mostly a gentle giant. So when news came out that Google has decided to buy DoubleClick, it left many of us stunned. If there’s an online company that epitomizes evil, it’s DoubleClick.
If you aren’t familiar with them, DoubleClick is in the business of selling banner ads — those flashing, annoying advertisements that sit above, beside, and even above those web pages you visit. That, in and of itself, is not why I dislike them — in fact, thanks to Privoxy, I almost never see their ads. But I’ve been doing the web thing long enough to recall back in 2000 when DoubleClick announced an frighteningly Orwellian scheme to identify every single web user and track the pages they visit.
After DoubleClick’s announcement there was an uproar. Numerous organizations including EPIC and the ACLU filed petitions with the FTC, which launched a 10 month investigation. Eventually DoubleClick backed off of its position and the investigation was dropped.
Fast forward several years and the poster child of online privacy invasion is getting hitched to the poster child of online corporate responsibility. I suppose we could interpret this in a positive way and hope that Google’s values infect those of the DoubleClick unit more than the other way around. But I can help but feel a bit nervous.
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