In the United States, regulators and policy makers are taking a close look at the issues surrounding behavioral advertising and how to protect the privacy of consumers. A vigorous debate is occurring over self-regulation versus the asserted need for legislation or regulation. So it is interesting to see what is going on in Europe in the realm of self-regulation.
In the EU, a privacy and data protection certification seal for IT products and IT-based services is in place, called the EuroPrise Privacy Seal. The EuroPrise Privacy Seal recently was awarded to a new German behavioral targeting system called Predictive Targeting Networking (PTN) 2.0 and offered by a company called Nugg.ad. The Nugg.ad system addresses many of the privacy issues that regulators here and abroad have focused on, such as cookie expiration dates, logging of IP addresses, the notice given to consumers, and opt out.
For more details, see this blog entry from the Future of Privacy Forum.