Consumer privacy groups have been complaining to the Federal Trade Commission about the enhanced targeting practices of marketers. They want stricter regulation of online data tracking-referred to more broadly as "behavioral targeting" these days. And the FTC is starting to listen, as the prospect of enhanced data targeting increases. Mergers like Google-DoubleClick and Microsoft-aQuantive have consumer groups particularly worried. One of their chief complaints is that ad networks can no longer contend that they don't collect personally identifiable information, as the increase in data collection leads to more distinct user profiles. Moreover, the ways that networks …

Everything old is new again: Facebook's advertising system is a new take on an old concept. Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz, authors of the influential 1955 media classic "Personal Influence" argued that marketers actually target certain individuals in their media messages, called "opinion leaders" rather than mass audiences. These individuals are today referred to as "influentials" because it is they who virally disseminate information. Social networks now make it possible for these targets to reach larger groups of peers more quickly and easily. However, by putting this kind of control in the hands of persons who …

Facebook has a new search bar allowing people to search for advertising pages. VentureBeat says the development marks "a steady creep in search options," suggesting Facebook aims to challenge Google's sacred territory. For now, no. Facebook search only includes tabs for searching people, groups, events, applications, and anything else you can find only within its network. The social network is not indexing the Web. Where would it get the search results? Microsoft. Such a partnership could lead to a high quality search engine. Social networks, with all that rich user data, are one area of the …

Last week, CEO Barry Diller announced that he was splitting IAC, the Internet empire, into five separate public companies. Critics said the move was proof that the media conglomerate approach doesn't work in the digital age. Ticketmaster, Lending Tree, home-shopping channel HSN and time-share travel business Interval International are branching off on their own. The rest, which includes search engine Ask.com, dating site Match.com and CitySearch, will continue to fall under the IAC brand. Diller reveals that more than 50% of the scaled-down company's revenue will come from Web advertising. Today, that figure is only 9%. But …

The New York Times' Saul Hansell opened a can of worms yesterday when he pointed out that Facebook's new advertising approach--which is to have friends basically advertise products and services to each other --could be illegal in the state of New York under a 100-year-old privacy law. The statute in question reads: "any person whose name, portrait, picture, or voice is used within this state for advertising purposes or for the purposes of trade without the written consent first obtained" can sue. Is opting-in the same thing as written consent? It's not an end-user licensing agreement, but should it be? …

Tech guru Tim O'Reilly loses his respect for Google's so-called OpenSocial initiative following a conversation with Patrick Chanezon, the project's developer advocate for the program. Incidentally, "open" is a misnomer, he says, because the API does not allow for data exchange between social networks. In other words, when you download an app for MySpace, you'd have to download it all over again at Bebo, and reenter the data. The applications do not communicate. You might ask: what, then, is the point of OpenSocial? Indeed. As such, "it provides little incremental value to the user," O'Reilly says--which means it …

In another New York Times piece on the advertising developments at Facebook, Laura Holson raises a good point about the potential for backlash when "friends" broadcast their favorite brands and purchases: it could very easily lead to people deleting friends, which by extension means fewer page views for Facebook. There's a big difference between hardcore Facebook users--those who spend three to four hours per day on the site--and regular users, or those who check their accounts once a day or four to five times per week. We're not gonna talk about the tens of thousands who hardly check the site--because …

Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick continues to hit roadblocks. This week, twelve Republican members of the House sent a letter to the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection demanding a public hearing on the proposed deal, because they worry that "The privacy implications of such a merger are enormous." CNET's Declan McCullagh says that politics are definitely at play here. For one thing, these same Republicans have been enthusiastically "extolling the virtues of mergers" for years, particularly in the telecommunications sector, whose major players equally enthusiastically fill their campaign coffers. "To say these Republicans …

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion saw its shares slide 12 percent on Thursday due to mounting fears of cutbacks in subscriptions from the financial sector. The dip actually followed an announcement from Cisco Systems, which said it had seen "dramatic decreases" in orders from U.S. banks during the third quarter. Many financial services firms under-delivered in the third quarter, thanks to the consumer credit crunch. However, Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek points out that RIM is not as heavily dependent on financial services as a company like Cisco. "RIM's subscriber base is 14-15 percent financial services--that's it," he said. "Their …

The Hollywood's Writers Guild is on strike. Among the many grudges they hold with the traditional media giants that pay them is compensation for digital recreations of their work. Forbes says the writers have to strike--that the future of their profession is at stake--while former Disney Chief Michael Eisner called it "insanity." Eisner, who is heavily invested in online video startup Veoh, contends that writers don't understand "there's no money" in digital media yet. Media companies, entrepreneurs, and the press have piped on and on about how the future is digital and the future is now. Meanwhile, most have …