Think of Facebook's Sponsored Stories, which debuted in January, as a new form of behavioral targeting. Not the type that drops a cookie in a Web browser and then an ad network matches the information in the cookie with an advertisement -- but rather, targeting based on social signals that identify behavior. So, if Sony buys a Sponsored Story ad and a user checks in or "like" (s) the brand, the status update will run in the user's news feed, and again as a paid display ad for the brand.

It is going to be a busy season on the privacy protection front, so buckle up. First, look for a flurry of mainstream news stories next week as a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the topic kicks off. In advance of the meeting, Senators John Kerry and John McCain are expected to float a legislative proposal for a consumer "privacy bill of rights," the Wall Street Journal is reporting.

Three-year-old DoubleVerify wants to bring more accountability and trust into online advertising, addressing problems like ads running near inappropriate content such as pornography sites and companies not getting what they paid for. Not easy issues to police, but necessary to run a respectable business.

AdoTube recently announced the initial results of testing of its response targeting platforms, which rely on users' answering survey questions to determine ads served to them. Response-Based Targeting has lifted click-through and engagement rates from 22% to 35%, view-through rates by 17% and 24%, and brand effectiveness, such as awareness and purchase intent, by more than 30% -- pretty interesting, as long as AdoTube Chief Strategy and Operations Officer Steven Jones didn't overhype the results.

More than a decade into the behavioral method of targeting audiences rather than content, we still explore new data points and test which previous actions are most predictive of future consumer behaviors. What qualifies a person as "in-market"? For how long? As more aspects of our lives move to digital platforms, more and different kinds of human action get translated into material that can be tracked and used in new ways. o wit, what can be done with the data about what people already own, as opposed to the desire for new stuff they express through search, shopping carts and …

On a recent visit to the hospital for a routine check-up, a hospital worker asked me to fill out forms stating my ethnicity, information she said the government would aggregate. She also told me to stop adding my social security number on hospital paperwork, stop giving it to medical workers when signing in for procedures, and stop providing the information to outpatient surgery centers. Too many people have access to the information and patients can no longer be guaranteed that the government-issued numbers won't end up in the wrong hands and sold to someone else, she said.

Transparency. Choice. Control. These have been the rallying cries of the self-regulatory efforts the online ad industry started deploying late last year around online behavioral advertising (OBA). The most visible piece of this effort is supposed to be the appearance of the Advertising Options icon supported by the Digital Advertising Alliance. I am still trying to capture one of these things in the wild, although I know that ad units powered by Evidon and DoubleVerify are out there.

What if advertisers relied on metrics to measure online advertising, reach and cookie deletion similar to those used to measure TV advertising? Ariel Geifman, principal analyst at MediaMind Research, says the company will create a platform for online advertising that measures reach and frequency similar to Gross Rating Points (GRP), a metric used to determine how many people viewed a show on television.

Opt-Out Man may have to go in for a name change soon. The venerable method for removing oneself from behavioral targeting online is morphing quickly into a move towards more universal Do Not Track and even ad blocking tools. As our own Wendy Davis reports this morning, Microsoft will issue a refresh of its Internet Explorer browser today that goes beyond merely Do Not Track functionality. The new tools actually will let the user block content from some sites, especially third-party ads. The blocking will be based on blacklists established by TRUSTe, Abine and Privacy Choice.

I must admit to being bewildered when first hearing the word "psychographic" ad targeting. A student of literature deconstructing the word might get the wrong impression. I mean, please, the prefix "psycho" attached to the word "graphic." It's enough to scare anyone into running in the opposite direction. Whew.