The former chief privacy officer of the FTC is only three months into his leadership of the NAI. He expects changes not only in his self-regulatory group's core code but also a widening of the discussion about what what industry self-policing needs to encompass in 2012.

Even for a longtime OBA watcher like me, using the tracking detection tool Ghostery was a revelation. Now owned by DAA compliance provider Evidon, the little plug-in for the browser tracks the trackers. Suddenly you could see that some of your favorite sites had cookies and beacons from a range of analytics companies, ad networks, data providers, etc. that most consumers had never heard of. And while the free utility has been available for years now, I still find many seasoned Web publishers who have never tried it.

Attributing data from cross-channel marketing strategies will become the next hurdle for marketers, especially as some search engines began withholding information from marketers. Yahoo last year shuttered Site Explorer, a link index. Microsoft removed support of the "link" command in its search engine Bing. Google continued to conceal link data, and said it would discontinue sharing logged-in user data.

I always knew I was a tech geek; I didn't need a new style of behavioral targeting to tell me that. I have a wife and daughter who are here to remind me of my "hopeless geekiness" pretty much at every opportunity. But who knew that my enjoyment of the music group Foster for the People would serve as a tip-off? According to the newly launched ToneMedia ad targeting company, people who search for this group and its lyrics (well, you try to decipher "Pumped Up Kicks" on your own) are 78% more likely than average to be IT decision-makers. …

Capturing product and category-level offline purchase data and tying it into online ad targeting to serve up display ads has not been easy. Google and others have been trying for years. But is ZIP+4 ad targeting the best the ad industry can do today? It gives advertisers the ability to pull in offline data based on ZIP codes plus the four-digit number that follows, narrowing down a user's geographic location.

The Mobile Marketing Association this week issued guidelines for app designers crafting privacy policies. This is sorely needed, but it only begins to address the larger issue of managing privacy issues on mobile. Many of the major mobile publishers have started including privacy policies in their apps of one sort or another. Nevertheless, the key challenge before everyone now is making the privacy policy relevant and usable by the mobile customer.

Data.com, a Salesforce.com company, will expand into Europe supported by an agreement announced Wednesday to make Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) data available to customers, Tricia Gellman, senior director of product marketing at Data.com, told MediaPost.

Whenever digital advertising decides it is time to explain behavioral targeting and walk people through the opt-out process, I usually pop a few coffees first. I know there is a tough slog ahead. Consider Google's tortured, multi-tiered "Ads Preferences" site. Because of the extensiveness of the Google reach, it has to parse its explanations into search and Gmail targeting vs. Web targeting. Each category gets its own comfy-cozy we're-not- really-following-you videos and separate opt-out mechanisms.

Globally, businesses created 1.8 zettabytes of data in 2011, according to research firm IDC. Data gives marketers the ability to better understand the relationship between brands and human behavior, but many just can't fathom the enormity of the bits and bytes generated from emerging online media. Two white papers published this month try to put the concept into context.

We know that American consumers shopped and bought online this holiday season in record numbers. But what did they think of the experience of gathering product information, evaluating alternatives and tapping that buy button? Personalization provider Baynote went straight to the consumers in a poll of over 1,000 online shoppers between Cyber Monday in late November and Christmas Eve to see how they said they were using and experiencing e-commerce, retailer sites, and tablets and mobile devices.