Stanford University computer scientist Jonathan Mayer released a paper recently highlighting the data leakage issues of behavioral targeting. He found Web sites share log-in names and personal information, such as a person's first and last names. Viewing a local ad on Home Depot's Web site might send the information to about a dozen companies.

Forget online behavioral advertising planting cookies on everyone's browsers. Forget the prospect of some enterprising data geek knitting together all that non-PII (personally identifiable information) into PII. Forget the stalking of retargeters. Forget the fears of being prejudicially segmented by marketers into unfavorable audience buckets. Forget about National Security Agency snooping. I say, set aside all of those concerns over privacy violations by any third party. We may all have our hands full for a while just managing the trail of digital behaviors all of us leave exposed haphazardly in a world of cloud storage and computing.

Facebook Fan pages have become nirvana for marketers looking for a solid earned media strategy, but who also want a data and targeting platform that improves accountability for marketing budgets and one-on-one relationship with potential and existing customers. Consider this the next form of behavioral targeting. And as the holidays quickly approach, marketers need to find way to increase traffic to Facebook Fan pages. Barilliance co-founder Ido Ariel thinks he has the answer.

Among the new intimacies of technology is its knowledge of where you are and the ability to read into location your intent. The nightmare and clichéd scenario of being pinged by Starbucks as you pass their store has always been held out as the dark side of mobile marketing's potential. In that view, geofencing (or using location as a trigger for mobile messaging) is something akin to being assaulted at shopping malls by overly aggressive kiosk salespeople -- because you look like the kind of guy who needs those microwaveable, chamomile-scented neck collars.

Companies continue to dig deeper into social platforms, even those developing behavioral targeting platforms. The accuracy with which these tools now serve up ads continue to become a bit creepy. It reminds me of the last time I logged on to Google Street View to check out my house and saw neighbors outside in mid-step walking down the sidewalk.

I don't know if my Comcast Xfinity iPad app is tracking my nightly crawl through its countless cable channels, noting which channels I tend to pick and ignore, what my tastes in nighttime entertainment might be. But lord, I sure hope it is. This indispensable app is tied to my cable box so that at long last I am freed from the stultifying and bad on-screen channel surfing interface. It turns the iPad into a big, fat, smart remote control that can filter the hundreds of channels by content type, search for specific shows and then flick my cable box …

Demand-side platforms (DSPs) have caught my attention. I predict they will change dramatically during the next year, moving from simply connecting brands to ad servers, toward providing what a Forrester Research analyst calls "customer," or custom, "intelligence" to sort through a variety of data. While the Forrester analyst refers to these companies as Data Management Platforms (DMPs), which are completely different, I see DSPs moving into this role.

Facebook did an Apple this week. It whipped up anticipatory enthusiasm for its CEO keynote and drafted off of a slew of rumors and intentional or unintentional leaks from partners. Much of what Mark Zuckerberg rolled out the other day at his f8 conference was aimed at enhancing the Facebook ecosystem in order for people to stay longer and do more on the site. They were trying to move the social network ever closer to becoming a platform unto itself, an uber-portal of sorts.

I'm fascinated by patents and often log on to the United States Patent & Trademark Office to search for newly filed or granted patents. This time I ran across a recently updated patent filing from Yahoo. The title, emoticlips, assists in targeting online ads based on the consumer's emotional state.

Forget your click-throughs, your hang times, your content choices. One of the basic Web behaviors that envelops all other determinations of effectiveness is the simple gaze. Where someone is looking -- at your Web site and your ad, for how long and even in what order -- should tell you volumes about what parts of your brand message are, and aren't, getting through.