This is a serious mistake. Sooner or later it will come home to roost. Those of us who think for ourselves find it scary to contemplate how such an intimate knowledge of our personal preferences and private activities might eventually be used to brand each of us as members of a particular group. Imagine, for example, one day being denied health insurance because your care provider had access to records of your family's grocery shopping habits and concluded on the basis of what you ate and drank that you were not a good financial risk. This is not an unrealistic scenario.
Mergers are the order of the day.
Abacus is a major catalog buying-behavior database manager. The combination of DoubleClick's Internet presence and ability to use cookies to follow users around the Internet and Abacus's vast consumer database allows the new merged company, which operates under the name of DoubleClick Inc., to merge an Internet user's online habits with their real world habits and identity. For consumers this represents an unprecedented level of monitoring. It gets worse. Given law enforcement's long, sordid history of abusing the privacy of innocent citizens, it is difficult to imagine such inquiries not involving a long hard look at the dossiers themselves.