• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, November 1, 2007

The Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. Public Interest Research Group renewed their call for an investigation into behavioral targeting this morning, filing a supplement to their year-old FTC complaint.

In the filing, timed to coincide with the start of a two-day conference addressing privacy and online advertising, the groups argue that"another year of industry consolidation, coupled with continued advances in tracking and targeting technologies, has left Internet users even more vulnerable to the incursions of invasive online marketing."

In addition to reiterating the concern that online marketers are using Web surfing history to create detailed profiles of users, the groups also specifically address the targeting of young Web users. "The cavalier attitude with which industry markets to youth online is nothing short of scandalous," they write, adding that behavioral targeting to children under the age of 13 appears to violate at least the spirit of The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998. That law -- spearheaded by the Center for Digital Democracy -- aims to protect the privacy of users 12 and under.

The groups also say that the prospect of behavioral targeting on social networks has emerged as a significant threat to privacy since they filed their original complaint last year. "Online marketers have recently set their sites on social networks, the Web 2.0 communities whose staggering popularity -- over 140 million users between MySpace and Facebook alone -- is outstripped only by their potential 'monetization,' in the language of Behavioral Targeting 2.0."

While these type of privacy concerns have been discussed for years, the resurgence of online advertising -- not to mention talk of $15 billion valuations for sites like Facebook -- seems to have infused advocates with a new sense of urgency.

At the same time, it's hard to know what privacy interest is being compromised on sites like MySpace and Facebook when users themselves are freely revealing details of their personal lives in ways that few people had foreseen even during the first dot-com boom.