Congress has decided to look into behavioral advertising. It will be interesting to see how the committee proceeds -- Congress doesn't have a sterling record in dealing with complex issues. On one hand, I hope they decide to forbid ISPs from the practice as the neutral carriers of traffic that they should be, but I'm not sure that intrusion would be warranted if the behavior tracking is internal to a site's operation (such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft).
From arstechnica:
"Committee on Energy and Commerce" and "rampage" don't often appear in the same sentence, but the House committee is certainly on a tear when it comes to behavioral advertising. Not content with firing off a bipartisan list of sharp questions to ISPs who installed NeduAd traffic analysis hardware, the Committee on Friday expanded its nastygram list to include "33 leading Internet and broadband companies" including Google, Microsoft, Time Warner, AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. Legislation on the issue could be coming. [From Congress wants privacy answers from Google, MS, AOL]
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