That bullseye could be you

A wave of new companies are entering the online advertising market, sporting new technology that drills deeper into user behavior to target and deliver ads, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Companies like NebuAd, FrontPorch and Phorm slip stealthily beyond existing "cookie" technology, which is painfully limited to partnerships with websites that drop those cookies on user's computers.

Instead, they track user behavior at the ISP level, which yields a clearer picture of overall user behavior.

In a perfect world, ISP-level tracking betrays the sites a user visits, as well as any interaction (clicks, conversions) they may have with the site.

The companies doing the tracking say the information they collect is secure and not traceable back to individual. Rather, the trackers build a benign profile based on online usage.

ISPs also say they take sufficient measures to protect user's privacy.

But privacy advocates aren't persuaded, saying the lack of transparency about what is being done with the data. One foul-up in those safeguards, they warn, could expose potentially harmful - or at least embarrassing - information on someone's online behavior.