as you learned in chapter 5 doubleclick is one of one of the largest banner advertising net-works in the world. doubleclick arranges the placement of banner ads on web sites. like many other web sites, doubleclick uses cookies, which are small text files placed on web client computers, to identify returning visitors
in 1999 doubleclick arranged $1.7 billion merger with abacus direct corporation . abacus had developed a way to link information about people's web behavior (collected through cookie such as those placed by doubleclick's banner ad servers) to the names , addresses , and other information about those people that had been collected in an offline consumer database
when the FTC probe concluded two years later , doubleclick was not charged with any violation of laws or regulation. the lesson here is that a company violates the internet community's ethical standards at its own peril, even if the transgression dose not break any laws.