FTC drops DoubleClick investigation

WASHINGTON--The Federal Trade Commission has dropped its investigation into the data-collection practices of DoubleClick Inc., the biggest Internet advertising company.

The FTC investigation and the controversy over online consumer privacy hurt DoubleClick's share price last year and forced the company to adopt sweeping new privacy standards.

In its investigation, the FTC found that DoubleClick didn't merge consumers' names and addresses with its data on anonymous Web surfing. In 1999, the company had announced plans to gather such data, but renounced them after a firestorm of criticism. It had planned to use consumer data gathered by the offline database company it had acquired, Abacus Direct.

Last May, DoubleClick's chief executive said it would not merge personal and anonymous data until there were clear industry-government guidelines on the matter. Even though such guidelines came out in July, DoubleClick has decided not to match personal data with Web surfing, a spokeswoman said. --Glenn R. Simpson, WSJ Interactive