There are many e-commerce success stories in the United States, but consumer privacy protection on the Internet is not one of them. Every click on a website triggers a continuous flow of information reporting, from the navigational path that visitors follow, to the topics that they search and the time that they spend viewing various content. All online actions can be logged and then aggregated with data regarding an individual's actions on previous visits. Aggregated data may also include details about registration on one or more websites, subscriptions to online services, purchases, preferences, and other information that has been collected by marketing affiliates and partners. The popularity of online advertising is driving the mining of ever more detailed consumer information in the quest to monetize websites and deliver highly targeted advertisements and offers. In the past decade this quest has created an internet interactive advertising ecosystem that a 2009 study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) estimated was responsible for $300 billion in total economic activity in the USA alone (IAB, 2009).

In an environment where tracking and collecting behavioral data is so closely associated with revenue generation, attempts to protect privacy on the Internet through industry self-regulation and voluntary adherence to privacy best practices have been largely unsuccessful. In 1994 the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed its first privacy violation case against an Internet company (Swindle, 1999).