Policy Makers' Privacy Concerns Spread Beyond the Internet

Washington policy makers, long concerned about how marketers use consumers' personal data to their guide sales pitches on the Internet, have stepped up scrutiny of the increasingly sophisticated ad-targeting techniques used in other media, ranging from mobile phones to TV commercials to the ads consumers get in their mail boxes. In recent years, marketers have grown more adept at culling consumer data from an array of online and offline sources -- including real-estate and motor-vehicle records, consumer surveys, credit-card data and logs of Web visitors' online behavior -- to identify the most receptive audiences for their ads. At a hearing Thursday, a House subcommittee plans to explore the impact of these practices on consumer privacy, and will hear from witnesses including advertising giant WPP, database-marketing company Acxiom, privacy advocates and others. Separately, the Federal Trade Commission, which has taken a more active role in policing online privacy this year, is preparing to take a wider look at data-collection practices at a roundtable meeting in December with representatives of the ad, media and technology industries and consumer groups.