DRUG COOKIES

Why Was The White House Drug Office Monitoring Your
Computer Behavior?

The White House drug office can't seem to keep itself out of trouble
these days. In the latest scandal to befall the beleaguered Office of
National Drug Control Policy, whose dubious ties with television
screenwriters have been documented on this site's Web pages, the
agency was forced to admit earlier this week that it allowed an
Internet data mining operation to collect information from visitors to
its youth-oriented anti-drug site FreeVibe.

New York Internet advertising agency DoubleClick supplied ONDCP with
the controversial cookie technology the agency used to data mine -- a
term used to describe the gathering of personal or anonymous
information about Internet users in order to track their demographics
and Web page dietary habits. The administration seemed blindsided by
the news, and even Washington privacy advocates suggested that it was
probably a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was
doing.

In a press briefing Wednesday, Clinton voicebox Joe Lockhart took
great pains to distance his boss from the latest ONDCP fiasco,
informing reporters that the president hadn't heard anything about it
until that day. Lockhart also said the White House ordered the ONDCP
to "take all steps necessary to halt these practices now" and to order
DoubleClick and other contractors to destroy any data that had been
compiled using the cookie technology that had been used on the site.

But calls from reporters and an upbraiding by the president had the
ONDCP on the defensive, too. ONDCP senior policy analyst Don Maple
told Salon that the "pixel tracking" cookie was used because Ogilvy &
Mather, the national firm that does the principal planning and
placement of the ONDCP's anti-drug campaign, requested better tracking
of click-throughs on ONDCP banner ads. Presumably, Ogilvy & Mather
wanted to determine the effectiveness of ONDCP's targeted ad placement
on other Internet sites. Maple stated firmly that the ONDCP has not
used the software to track personal data about the users; the cookies
anonymously tracked users to the ONDCP's Web site and followed them
anonymously as they traveled through its pages. "We felt the privacy
safeguards were complete," he said.

The gaffe is embarrassing for the White House for two reasons. First,
two years ago and with great fanfare, President Clinton supported
efforts to pass a law in April 1998 that would protect children from
data mining by commercial Internet companies. The Children's Online
Privacy Protection Act does not apply to government sites, but some of
the very people who helped pass that legislation think it's
hypocritical for the government to use software technology that is
often associated with surreptitious collection of personal data from
Internet users, even if it is only tracking users anonymously. Maple
said the ONDCP was under orders to comply with COPPA, and that he
believes the technology partnership with DoubleClick was not a violation.

"The sheer irresponsibility of it and the ethical position they put
themselves in was quite shocking," says Andrew Shen, a policy analyst
at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an Internet privacy
rights organization in Washington.

Second, DoubleClick's plans to merge the data it collects from
Internet users with other databases so outraged regulators that the
Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation into the company.
It was exactly the sort of predatory practice the Clinton
administration was trying to protect children from when it pushed the
privacy bill in 1998.

"That's not a very good company to outsource to if you're collecting
information and trying to do it in a responsible manner," said Shen.

The ONDCP's data mining techniques don't violate COPPA, since that law
only applies to commercial Web sites, but Center for Media Education
president Kathryn Montgomery, who lobbied for passage of the youth
data mining law and "badgered" the Clinton administration into
supporting it, says that shouldn't matter. "The principles should be
applied everywhere," she says. "The whole idea that there's this
surreptitious monitoring and marketing going on is not ethical in my
opinion, even though it's becoming very common. They're doing it with
young people, with children. I think it was unethical and
inappropriate."

"I think they are often very willing to embrace the practices of the
commercial industry," Montgomery says, "believing that that's the
latest thing and the appropriate thing to be doing."

Says the ONDCP's Maple: "What it looked like when we were briefed on this
months ago was that it was the standard business practice employed by
virtually everybody." But sometimes, the latest, greatest technology can
lead to disaster, as even Maple now admits.

"It looks different today than it did months ago," Maple concedes. "It
makes a big difference when you see and hear the reaction by the White
House -- not for the technical specifics of what we understood we were
doing, but to the perception of many to any form of this tracker
technology." Maple also said the organization had underestimated the
sensitivity of President Clinton to tracking technologies.

"We underestimated their sensitivity to the use of any form of
tracking devices with respect to privacy. Having been apprised, we
immediately agreed to cease and stop using them. It doesn't have any
major effect on the campaign," he said.