Why We Accepted Surveillance as Default

On Second Thought — Episode 04 In January 1996, two men in New York City founded a company called DoubleClick. Kevin O'Connor and Dwight Merriman had a product they called DART: Dynamic Advertising, Reporting, and Targeting. The premise was that advertisers should be able to follow a person across websites in order to serve them relevant ads. DoubleClick went public on NASDAQ in 1998. In 1999, it acquired Abacus Direct, a consumer-purchasing data broker, and merged the offline and online identit