For as long as I have been covering digital media -- and especially behavioral targeted advertising -- technology companies and ad networks have complained that they're being held to a higher standard of consumer privacy protection than the off-line world. After all, credit card companies, magazine companies, telemarketers, and direct mail have all been swapping our names, addresses, and demographics for decades. But despite industry protests, digital data tracking has always been seen as somehow more surreptitious and dangerous than offline data gathering. Well, the retail segment may actually be doing online advertisers and technology companies an unintentional favor. The …

iPass released findings from its Q1 2013 Global Mobile Workforce Report analyzing the evolution of the bring your own device (BYOD) trend and the hurdles to Wi-Fi connectivity and download speeds. The research shows that while business users of mobile leverage a variety of devices, data limits affect productivity. And while the report doesn't mention this as a problem, slowing access or lack of connectivity could also affect the way ads serve-up across the internet and targeting techniques.

Facebook is experimenting with an extraordinarily bad idea: using push notifications in mobile apps to get people to update their status more frequently. Facebook confirmed to Mashable that this was a limited test it was trying in specific regions. It almost goes without saying that this is incredibly stupid. Users almost certainly will get annoyed and quickly disable the app.

The Chameleon Botnet discovered in February cost advertisers $6.2 million monthly, targeting more than 202 Web sites, and accounting for about 9 billion of the 14 billion ad impressions served up monthly, according to U.K.-based Spider.io. Scary thought considering how much money advertisers waste.

I noticed quite a few really smart people speaking at the latest South by Southwest interactive (SXSWi) conference expressed their discontent with the overall quality of the Internet. That's aside from the World Wide Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who during a keynote said that "the reason the Internet sucks today is because we haven't fixed it yet. ... We messed up."

Amazon is No. 1 in customer service, even above Nordstrom, according to Todd Morris, EVP brand development at Catalina. The reason? Personalization, he told South by Southwest attendees during a session titled "Death by Demographics: Killing Off your Ad Budget."

In her first public appearance since becoming Chair of the FTC, Edith Ramirez made clear she was not going to be shy about using the Commission's authority to press digital companies on privacy.

Utopia's execs are attempting to change the way companies think about data by creating an enterprise data lifecycle management (EDLM) framework to manage data throughout its lifecycle, from creation and capture through management, maintenance, archiving and disposal.

In a thoughtful study, the World Economic Forum and Boston Consulting Group argue that existing data privacy interactions with consumers are obsolete and need to reflect the new realities of big data use cases and sharing.