DoubleClick Inc is an internet marketing and advertising corporation. The company was established in the year 1995 as an internet application service provider (Schwabach, 2006). Unlike other internet service providers, the company specializes in ad-serving and banner ads.
In the year 1998, the company was listed among several prominent internet companies such as AOL, Yahoo, and Vista. During this period, the company’s dynamic advertising, reporting, and targeting services were rated the best in the world.
With such reputation, the company was able to increase its targeting and reporting of advertisement services. In the year 1999, Abacus Direct Company merged with the company.
Abacus Direct Company focused on data collection. With their association, there were fears that secret web-serving profiles collected by Abacus would be compromised. In the year 20007, Google acquired DoubleClick Inc.
Currently, the company is fully owned by Google. The company generates money from internet advertisers and publishers through ad-serving, ad-delivery, and behavioral targeting. For the above operations to be successful, the company collects its data from the internet users’ online activities.
A number of information collected by the company includes web browser, operating system, ISP, bandwidth, and time of the day. The data are recorded in the company’s generic DoubleClick cookie.
This cookie captures the time the online user saw the advert, advert placement id, user’s id, client’s IP address, and user’s referral URL.
Through this, the company can precisely pinpoint the time and date the user saw the advert. Similarly, by analyzing the users’ IP addresses the company can pinpoint the users’ countries, towns, and cities.
Through frequency capping technology, the company uses the cookie information it captures to target advertisements with regard to the number of times a user accesses a specific message on the internet.
When the cookie is connected with an Adsense site and a specific web browser user signs into another website through the site, similar data will be documented and shared. After a while, speculations on the users’ interests will be formulated. Through this, it can be guessed whether the user likes football, basketball, music, or any other activity. If substantial browsers exhibit similar outlines, they become part of a segment. These segments are labeled based on their users’ interests. Through these labels, the company can let advertisers select the type of users they want to access their adverts.
The company’s major customers are advertising, marketing, and media organizations. DoubleClick’s services and technologies are sold directly to these customers. Through these services, potential online users can access customers’ adverts.
The company employs the DART technology to establish the ads to be delivered to specific users. Through this approach, the company can aid websites and marketers to distribute their adverts.
For web publishers, the data sold to them enables them to modernize their functions allowing them to gain the best price for their impressions. On the other hand, advertisers and agencies can make use of the information obtained from the company to reinforce and ease complex online campaigns.
On the company’s website, the company has outlined its privacy policy. The policy asserts that the company will safeguard the users’ security details. With thorough analysis, an individual will realize that the company’s privacy policy outlined on their website is inadequate.
The company does not address the issue of users’ privacy adequately (Oz, 2008). Given the fact that the company has been accused in the past for violating individual privacy rights, the company should have outlined adequate privacy policies on its website.
In this regard, the company should inform users how their data is collected and used. As such, the company should inform internet users that they monitor their online activities and that they associate these activities with their address and gender.
Similarly, if the users are informed of these acts, they should be given a chance to determine whether they are willing to monitored by the company. If the users are not willing to be monitored, their privacy rights should be respected.
Equally, on the website the company has not outlined a general privacy policy in a bid to avoid legal issues with the users. If the company details its general privacy policies on its websites, it might have to detail their operations and their relation to individual privacy rights.
In this event, the company will expose to the public how their operations contravene individuals’ rights to secrecy.
Currently, the company is marred by several controversies. The company has several pending lawsuits related private policy issues. Similarly, some users have accused the company for misleading them. According to these users, the company lies to the users that they can freely opt out of its IP address-based tracking system.
In reality, the users’ opt-out option is ineffective. To avoid damaging its reputation, the company should rebuild the users and operators trust by formulating appropriate private policies.
Equally, the company should outline these policies on their website for everyone to access them. These policies should be accurate and clear (Lucey, 2005).
References
Lucey, T. (2005). Management information systems (9th ed.). London: Thomson Learning.
Oz, E. (2008). Management Information Systems (6th ed.). New York: Course Technology Ptr.
Schwabach, A. (2006). Internet and the law: technology, society, and compromises. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO.