Society and the Internet

“Getting over it”

The threats to privacy in the new Internet age were crystallized in 2000 by the case of DoubleClick, Inc. For a few years DoubleClick, the Internet’s largest advertising company, had been compiling detailed information on the browsing habits of millions of World Wide Web users by placing “cookie” files on computer hard drives. Cookies are electronic footprints that allow websites and advertising networks to monitor people’s online movements with telescopic precision—including the search terms people enter as well as the articles they skim and how long they spend skimming them. As long as users were confident that their virtual identities were not being linked to their actual identities, many were happy to accept DoubleClick cookies in exchange for the convenience of navigating the Web more efficiently. Then in November 1999 DoubleClick bought Abacus Direct, which held a database of names, addresses, and information about the off-line buying habits of 90 million households compiled from the largest direct-mail catalogs and retailers in the nation. Two months later DoubleClick began compiling profiles linking individuals’ actual names and addresses to Abacus’s detailed records of their online and off-line purchases. Suddenly, shopping that once seemed anonymous was being archived in personally identifiable dossiers.

Under pressure from privacy advocates and dot-com investors, DoubleClick announced in 2000 that it would postpone its profiling scheme until the U.S. government and the e-commerce industry had agreed on privacy standards. Two years later it settled consolidated class-action lawsuits from several states, agreeing to pay legal expenses of up to $1.8 million, to tell consumers about its data-collection activities in its online privacy policy, and to get permission before combining a consumer’s personally identifiable data with his or her Web-surfing history. DoubleClick also agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle differences with attorneys general from 10 states who were investigating its information gathering.

The retreat of DoubleClick might have seemed like a victory for privacy, but it was only an early battle in a much larger war—one in which many observers still worry that privacy may be vanquished. “You already have zero privacy—get over it,” Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, memorably remarked in 1999 in response to a question at a product show at which Sun introduced a new interactive technology called Jini. Sun’s cheerful website promised to usher in the “networked home” of the future, in which the company’s “gateway” software would operate “like a congenial party host inside the home to help consumer appliances communicate intelligently with each other and with outside networks.” In this chatty new world of electronic networking, a household’s refrigerator and coffeemaker could talk to a television, and all three could be monitored from the office computer. The incessant information exchanged by these gossiping appliances might, of course, generate detailed records of the most intimate details of their owners’ daily lives.

New evidence seemed to emerge every day to support McNealy’s grim verdict about the triumph of online surveillance technology over privacy. A survey of nearly a thousand large companies conducted by the American Management Association in 2000 found that more than half of the large American firms surveyed monitored the Internet connections of their employees. Two-thirds of the firms monitored e-mail messages, computer files, or telephone conversations, up from only one-third three years earlier. Some companies used Orwellian computer software with names like Spector, Assentor, or Investigator that could monitor and record every keystroke on the computer with video-like precision. These virtual snoops could also be programmed to screen all incoming and outgoing e-mail for forbidden words and phrases—such as those involving racism, body parts, or the name of the boss—and then forward suspicious messages to a supervisor for review.