Pubdate: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 Source: Washington Post (DC) Copyright: 2000 The Washington Post Company Contact: 1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071 Feedback: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Authors: John F. Harris and John Schwartz, Washington Post Staff Writers ANTI-DRUG WEB SITE TRACKS VISITORS News that the White House drug control office is secretly placing digital bugs on the computers of people who visit one of its Web sites caused an uproar yesterday, prompting White House Chief of Staff John D. Podesta to order the practice stopped. Podesta also demanded an explanation from Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the National Drug Control Policy Office, for how the practice of monitoring traffic through dropping electronic "cookies" on the hard drives of Web visitors began, White House officials said. The surreptitious tracking by one of its own agencies was especially embarrassing to the White House, because it contradicts privacy policies that the Clinton administration is advocating for the private sector. The Scripps-Howard News Service reported that cookies--a fairly simple computer code--were being slipped without notice on computers to monitor the effectiveness of an online anti-drug campaign. The ad campaign worked in much the same way as other advertising that is linked to Web search engines. When Web users typed in certain key words relating to drugs, a banner ad would pop up on the screen inviting them to click on www.freevibe.com, an anti-drug site run by the drug control office. If people clicked on the site, a cookie was dropped onto their hard drives. The cookie's code allows the advertiser to see how the user entered the site, and what pages were entered once there. The use of cookies without notice or permission is a controversial, though commonplace, practice in the private sector. The Federal Trade Commission has sought greater authority to set and enforce privacy standards, and Vice President Gore recently has made privacy an increasingly prominent campaign theme. In a statement, White House press secretary Joe Lockhart said the drug control office had not tracked visitors by name or otherwise identified them. But he emphasized that West Wing officials "learned for the first time" yesterday about the office's use of cookies, and pledged, "We will take all steps necessary to halt these practices now." Don Maple, who helps run the media campaign for the drug control office, said that officials there had believed the use of cookies was defensible. The office's advertising is placed by Ogilvy & Mather, which in turn contracted with DoubleClick Inc., the leading Internet advertising company. DoubleClick placed the cookies and reported the data back to Ogilvy & Mather, he said. "The idea was that our advertising buyers wanted and needed a tool to decide where to place their banner ads," Maple said, adding that only "anonymous gross-number data" about Web visits were collected in what the drug control office believed was a way of determining whether it was spending its money wisely. "We discovered we had underestimated the sensitivity of the White House to this practice," Maple said. He pledged that the contractors "would destroy whatever data" have been collected. McCaffrey's operation stirred objections from civil libertarians a year after reports that the drug control office allowed TV networks to fulfill their obligation for public service advertising if they agreed to run programs with a government-approved anti-drug message. This time, he will also face questions from Congress. Rep. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-La.) is sending a letter voicing strong opposition to the use of cookies and demanding an explanation of how they came to be used, his spokesman Ken Johnson said yesterday. While the drug control office knew about the cookies used on freevibe.com, Maple said the office learned only this week after news inquiries that cookies were also being dropped by the Web server for another site run by the office, this one aimed at parents and called theantidrug.com. That practice too is being halted, he said. The drug control office's use of cookies was discovered by privacy advocate Richard M. Smith, who said he found it earlier this year while doing research on the privacy practices of health-related Web sites. DoubleClick has become one of the most reviled companies in the online world among privacy advocates, who have attacked its use of Internet cookies and more advanced technologies to monitor consumer behavior. The firm says the practice allows Web ads to be more tailored for advertisers and consumers alike, and that information is not shared. "It is totally anonymous. It is not used for profiling. It is the property of that site and it is not shared with anyone else," said Josh Isay, director of public policy and government affairs for DoubleClick. Smith said that none of his research proves that DoubleClick or the drug policy office has been spying on Americans, only that the technology would allow either to do so. "The problem is . . . DoubleClick is gathering all this information about us that's really none of their business . . . they're creating databases that could be interesting to law enforcement down the road." - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D