EQUTE — The FTC started talks on targeted advertising, a first step toward stiffer regulations on what advertisers can collect and how they can use it with or without web users knowing.

According to the FTC press release, the round table and town hall will cover a slew of topics:

The FTC examined similar issues in 2000, when it held a public workshop and issued two reports on the practice of online profiling.

This round table, however, included new uses of the web in its investigation of online advertising. The FTC privacy roundtable included how information flowed from social media to advertisers, which is something that even a lot of internet professionals know much about.

Adotas had a good post about how the industry and privacy advocates differ.

Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai, suggesting that by using the FTC’s definition of privacy principals, which might even drill down to frequency capping would include 70% to 80% of the online advertising industry, a figure far larger than the $1 billion normally tossed around.
While privacy advocates and academics were represented in force, executives from Google, Microsoft and WalMart, as well as smaller behavioral targeting companies, pleaded the industry’s case. Zaneis found WalMart’s presence particularly refreshing as e-tailers have not been in the forefront during this ordeal. The company obeys an extensive privacy policy when dealing with third parties.
Though the gap in views on regulation was wide, the two agreed on one thing: consumers are not well enough informed about how targeting works.

The Privacy Matters campaign was created to combat that ignorance and was created soon before the roundtable to explain how it worked, but the roundtable showed that no matter how much was done to promote understanding, there was little in the way of education at the user end.