Executive wanted to deflect lawsuits. Must have no self-esteem and an ability to tolerate derision from entire company and, in fact, entire industry. Can expect no corporate support or follow-through. Position embodies everything the company despises. High pay will compensate right candidate for insecurity of job, which could end if not of sufficient PR value. Send applications to DoubleClick, New York, New York.
You're all e-mailing your resumes, right?
DoubleClick [DCLK], the Internet-advertising giant, is in the market for a chief privacy officer (CPO, the company informs us, implying parity with its CEO, CFO and CTO). The new position is part of DoubleClick's attempt, announced yesterday, to stave off lawsuits and government investigations over plans to compile a massive database of information on all users visiting sites carrying DoubleClick ads.
The position could just as well be labeled CYA, because that's what DoubleClick is doing. Facing an Electronic Privacy Information Center complaint against it at the Federal Trade Commission and the threat of privacy lawsuits such as two facing Amazon.com [AMZN], DoubleClick is also offering to serve 50 million privacy-education banner ads, which will connect to a privacy site that will host an opt-out link for DoubleClick's surveillance of Net users.
Consumer advocates consider the site an improvement on DoubleClick's optout policy, which requires the four Internet users who have noticed the company to visit the DoubleClick site. But the CPO job is the howler of the week.
There are precedents, true. The ombudsman at a major newspaper comes to mind. But we can think of no corporate position that so diametrically opposes its company's raison d'etre as that of the CPO. It's the equivalent of a chief public-health officer (CPHO) at Phillip Morris [MO] or a literacy officer (LO) at the WB Network.
DoubleClick is in the business of removing privacy. It plans to combine the personal-information database it acquired in its merger with Abacus Direct, the leading catalog-database firm, with anonymous click-tracking of Internet users on sites with DoubleClick ads. DoubleClick tracks user movements by using ads to place "cookie" text files on their hard drives. If a high percentage of users opt out of surveillance, the company would have no data to sell. TelecomWeb, the Phillips International site on which Communications Today appears, uses DoubleClick-served ads. Paul Coe Clark III
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