From Search Engine Land’s “FTC Town Hall Meeting to Examine ‘Behavioral Advertising’“:

The US Federal Trade Commission is going to have a public forum in Washington, DC on Nov. 1-2 to bring together various consumer groups, academics and interested parties to address concerns “raised by the practice of tracking consumers’ activities online to target advertising.

The article goes on to list a variety of topics that the FTC looks to discuss during the two-day meeting. According to the FTC’s official announcement on the meeting, several privacy groups and The State of New York have been urging the government to find out more about how behavioral advertising impacts consumer privacy.

The FTC - indeed, governments in general - are starting to pay a lot more attention to online advertising, search engines, and Internet-based activities. This is an understandable side-effect to increased amounts of Internet users and the growing myriad of things that folks are now doing online.

What do you think the FTC and other governmental agencies are going to discover when they start looking hard? A safe, self-regulated environment in which consumers are protected and their privacy safe-guarded? Or a world of rampant privacy violations, shady business practices, and undisclosed uses of consumer data?

Unfortunately… they will probably see the latter. Whether that’s an accurate portrayal or not is beside the point - that’s how it will appear to outside regulators. So what can we ultimately expect in the coming years as a result of this increased scrutiny of the Internet?

More governmental regulation, laws, acts, Congressional hearings, court cases, etc.  Just great.