Teaching Temperance to the “Cookie Monster”: Ethical Challenges to Data Mining and Direct Marketing

Abstract

R ecently, DoubleClick made the decision to merge the Internet tracking information contained in its ‘‘cookies’’ with the customer databases of Abacus Direct. It then announced its plan to sell its data, which raised significant concerns about the trade-offs between loss of individual privacy and economic benefits of data mining and direct marketing. In the short term, external pressure from privacy watch-dog organizations like EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) based on its concerns about corporate violations of the individual’s privacy, forced DoubleClick to reconsider the decision to sell to direct marketing firms the substantial data it has collected. To this point, there has been significant writing in the fields of communication, law, and technology about the means and the extent of government and corporate rights to collect and use the personal data of individual Internet users. Furthermore, the work of groups like EPIC has been successful in initiating legislative action dictating what can and cannot be done by corporations with regard to the marketing and collection of data about individuals. The concern of this essay, therefore, is not to argue for the justification of existing or further external sanctions (i.e., government legislation, consumer boycotts, etc.) against businesses involved in this aspect of e-commerce.