>From the WSJ: ---------------------- Intuit Acts to Curb Leaks On Quicken to Ad Firms By GLENN R. SIMPSON Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Personal financial information that consumers key into Intuit Corp.'s popular Quicken Web site has been leaking out to advertisers, and the company moved swiftly to address the problem. A design quirk in some e-commerce Web sites allows sensitive information that consumers provide about their personal habits, tastes or finances to be attached to Web page location codes used by third parties such as ad-placement companies. In the case of Intuit, both a mortgage-calculator and a credit-assessment feature on its Quicken site collect information from customers regarding income, assets and debt, and then send the data to DoubleClick Inc., a company that sells and places advertising on Web sites. DoubleClick says it doesn't keep any of the data it receives. The "data spillage" problem, discovered by Richard M. Smith, an Internet-security consultant, appears to be widespread and isn't limited to personal-finance sites. Among others, retailer Buy.com appears to be sending Double Click the titles of videos its customers are searching for on the site. [The article continues] . . .
