[KLUG Members] What the heck is clickthru.online.com ?

[Bob Kanaley]

Greetings,

I subscribe to a couple of enewletters from TechRepublic. They seem to have
some good content, so I would kinda like to keep getting them. However, I am
concerned that I am exposing myself to spammers by doing this. Although
TechRepublic has a reasonable privacy policy, most links to TechRepublic
content promoted in the enewsletter seem to require passing through a third
party, clickthru.online.com.

At first, I suspected that TechRepublic was using this pass through to sell
my personal information to clickthru.online.com that would then be free to
sell this information about me to spammers.

To check this out, I did a google search on clickthru.online.com but didn't
turn up any useful info. So, I did a host -d -t clickthru.online.com. It
turns out that the nameserver SOA for clickthru.online.com is ns.cnet.com
the same nameserver as TechRepublic.

Can one business unit transfer info to another business unit to avoid their
own privacy policy?

Am I being completely paranoid here?

Robert V. Kanaley
Information Systems Administrator
Agdia, Inc.
rvk@agdia.com
http://www.agdia.com