Apple and Google Won’t Save Online Privacy. Take It From a Former DoubleClick Executive.
An industry veteran on why recent moves from the tech giants should be the impetus for a federal privacy law
Jules Polonetsky remembers the moment that shattered his naivete about the internet.
“I was the consumer affairs commissioner for New York City 20 years ago when some company I’d never heard of came in with a big billboard,” he recalls. “It said, ‘Welcome to Silicon Alley,’ sponsored by DoubleClick.” I’d read in the headlines that DoubleClick was in trouble for using something called cookies. And something to do with “appending your identity” to your web-browsing history.
DoubleClick was a pioneer in targeted advertising: It used cookies to track people around the web for the benefit of advertisers across its vast network, a now-ubiquitous model that was cutting-edge at the time. And it had stirred one of the first big online privacy scares when it announced a merger with Abacus Direct, a major broker of data on consumers’ offline purchasing habits.
Until then, in Polonetsky’s mind, “We all thought we were anonymous on the internet. No one knew we were dogs.”
