DoubleClick, referral URLs and why The Reg is wrong Privacy from Companies6/29/2000; 8:08:18 AM "Recently we [The Register] wrote a story about Web form 'leakage', under the headline Another day, another Doubleclick privacy PR disaster."DoubleClick thought the piece was inaccurate and harsh, particularly because it was singled out for "an Internet problem" - the leakage of personal information through referral URLs."We offered the company the right to reply, and here it is, unedited, from the pen of Jules Polonetsky, chief privacy officer, DoubleClick Inc."Worth reading. As near as I can figure it, this is damage control on the part of Doubleclick, but what they say in the letter is true; they did not have control over what other sites use for forms.For the record, the GET mechanism the letter talks about it what Google or most other search engines use, where your query can be seen in the URL. POST is what Userland sites use, where you can't see stuff you typed in forms in the URL. By using GET, sites were accidentally passing information to Doubleclick, which is what caused the PR problem.