FTC in the News:
Federal Trade Commission staff today issued a report describing its ongoing examination of online behavioral advertising and setting forth revisions to proposed principles to govern self-regulatory efforts in this area. The key issue concerns how online advertisers can best protect consumers’ privacy while collecting information about their online activities.
The FTC is on the hunt again. This time it’s behavioral targeting. I’m sure heads will roll and companies will be put out of business, but really for what? Consider when a user is targeted properly by an advertiser the ad that they see is based upon their past interests, and surfing 
history. This should be a good thing, right? I delight when I see a well place ad from ESPN, because their ad agency has done some research and understood how to best communicate with me. I understand there needs to be regulation, and I support the FTC’s efforts regarding most endeavors, but are they upholding their tag line of “Protecting Americas Consumers” on this one?
What do you think?
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Christopher Dessi 
I believe you missed the point.
The FTC is less concerned about whether or not Internet Ad Broker LLC. knows we prefer yellow toasters and is more concerned that the information came by way of a piece of software that appeared mysteriously out of nowhere and did not properly inform us that it was going to tell someone about our toaster preferences.
Anyway, the language there at the FTC is starting to get a little more terse: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/ftc-last-chance-for-net-advertisers-to-come-to-jesus.ars
Thank you *very* much for sharing your insight. I’ll bookmark this.