Amid an escalating data-collection scandal within the Obama administration, the investigative arm of Congress is conducting a study of data brokers.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., commissioned the study of information resellers by the Government Accountability Office, the non-partisan research and investigative arm of Congress. The GAO confirmed the study, to be completed in late summer. The GAO is “is looking at what laws and regulations regarding the privacy of consumer information held by information resellers, and what gaps, if any, exist in this legal framework,” according to Chuck Young, the GAO’s managing director-public affairs.

The study will also cover “the advantages and disadvantages of key policy options that have been proposed to improve consumer data privacy,” he said.  

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Privacy legislation has been brewing in congress for years now, but a combination of public apathy and strong industry opposition has kept it at bay. Could the Prism data surveillance scandal become the watershed moment that propels it forward?

It's too soon to tell how revelations that the U.S. government has been mining web communications and phone logs will impact public opinion, but none of what the government has been implicated in doing would be possible if corporations weren't mining and storing consumer data, often for advertising purposes.

“The privacy legislation has been a bit on the back burner, and I think this may help focus more attention on it and perhaps put it back on the front burner,” said Linda Goldstein, a partner and chair of the advertising, marketing and media division at Manatt, Phelps and Phillips. “This could have a significant impact on consumer attitudes which ultimately could impact consumers’ willingness to share information with brands.”

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The Republican National Committee has hired a new head of tech in the hopes of crossing the chasm between it and the more tech-savvy party to the left. The GOP has hired Andy Barkett, former infrastructure and engineering exec at Facebook and self-proclaimed “nerd-herding” specialist, to broaden its digital and data capabilities.  Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee has yet to name a permanent tech director to replace the one who left in April to work for the Obama campaign’s outside data services firm, according to sources familiar with the situation.

While at Facebook, Mr. Barkett “was in charge of dozens of engineers on six production engineering teams responsible for thousands of servers and scaling systems in mobile infrastructure, messaging, advertisements, newsfeeds, platforms, and payments,” according to an RNC statement.

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Salesforce.com has agreed to purchase email platform ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. It was exactly one year ago today that Salesforce.com dove deep into social marketing with its Buddy Media acquisition. The deal could give Salesforce a leg up when it comes to offering clients -- many of which already work with ExactTarget -- a more integrated approach to cross-channel campaigns, whether aimed at business clients or consumers.

“When you talk to CMOs, there’s this idea that we’ve moved from just pages…into a world where people are signing up to do stuff,” said Michael Lazerow, CMO of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Buddy Media CEO. Customers now expect companies to know what they’ve bought no matter what channel they’re interacting in, he added.  “And all of that data that we now are unifying can be used to build a next-generation customer platform.”

While email marketing has never had the cachet of social-media marketing, the purchase indicates the continued importance of the channel and the desire for marketers to use it more strategically in conjunction with things like personalized site content, CRM call centers, social posts and social-media advertising.

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Gas stations, retailers and restaurants would love to have a better handle on the size and scope of the market they could reach but don’t. To do that, some are experimenting with a new technology that tracks consumers through their mobile devices and aims discounts and offers to their phones.

Sunoco, Phillips66 and Marathon filling stations in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio and a handful of shopping centers in Florida are among early testers of the iSign mobile technology, which lets retailers and restaurant operators measure the number of people who pass by their establishments and track responses to targeted discounts sent to mobile phones.

The technology uses antennas installed in business locations that detect WiFi or Bluetooth signals from mobile devices up to 300 feet away. The system currently detects around 1.5 million phones each month, according to Alex Romanov, founder and CEO of iSign Media.

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“Three years ago I went to the dark side.”

And by “the dark side,” Claudia Perlich means advertising.

The data whiz joined ad targeting firm Media6Degrees in 2010, where she and her small team of data crunchers build thousands of algorithms every week to help advertisers reach people those models suggest are likely to buy their products.

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Qualitative data requires a subjective decision in order to be categorized or measured. Qualitative data  can be described and observed, but not measured like quantitative data.

For marketers, qualitative data is typically information gleaned in surveys, focus groups or social media posts. The information can be categorized, for instance, according to sentiment.

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Map/Reduce is an open source programming model originally built by Google that is used in Hadoop for processing large data sets. Map/Reduce is typically used to make the process of computing on clusters of computers more efficient. Mapping takes a set of data and converts it into another set of data, where individual elements are broken down into a sequence or ordered list of elements, known as tuples. Reduce then takes the output from a map as input and combines those data tuples into a smaller set of tuples.

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Nielsen has partnered with IBM to put its Watson technology to work for advertisers. IBM will make the data-parsing system which famously outwitted "Jeopardy!" champions in 2011 available to companies for CRM, customer call centers and other purposes through its new Watson Engagement Advisor offering. Over the next several months Nielsen aims to apply the Watson technology to improve measurement of ad effectiveness and media planning.

"There's lots of information and data in the public domain that the average practitioner … typically isn't taking advantage of and Watson would use all of this information to come up with the best possible answer," said Randall Beard, global head, Advertiser Solutions at Nielsen.

A 26-year-old media planner....asks questions like, 'Who are my best prospects in the telecom category?' and 'How much should I budget for next year,'" said Mr. Beard. Using Watson, that media planner could tap into data she might normally ignore.

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Craig Hayman

Remember when the customer service desk was just a euphemism for a complaint bureau? Back then, customers ranted on the phone or in person about returns, wrong sizes, and overcharges. The idea was a good one, but the end result was frustrated shoppers.

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"Keep Calm and Continue Testing." The Harvard student's T-shirt tagline seemed to encapsulate the mood in the frigid room filled with data crunchers. It was just another drizzly Saturday in the MIT neighborhood of Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass., where mostly young men gazed at their laptops, observing predictive models parsing data representing grocery-store purchases of things like DVDs and milk. It was just another hackathon.

But this time it was sponsored by a consumer-data firm hoping to foster innovations in data analysis, and perhaps get a jump on the competition when it comes to harvesting potential data-science employees. More and more companies with lots of data to play with are sponsoring hack events to tap into fresh analytical talent.

"It smells like math in here," quipped Malcolm Faulds, head of global marketing at Dunnhumby. The 24-year-old consumer-data company was sponsoring the hack, an 11-hour slog pitting small teams of coders against one another in a contest to come up with the most accurate model for predicting the sales success of several grocery items 26 weeks after launch.

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In 10 years, there will be 50 billion industrial machines connected to the internet, predicts Stephen Liguori, executive director-global innovation and new models at GE. The 123-year-old firm calls it the "industrial internet" and it's the next wave of the consumer-focused internet of things connecting everyday products to data-collecting platforms.

The phenomenon is a ways off but GE is working to generate technology that collects and parses data to create greater efficiencies for businesses such as aviation, health care and "for folks that work in the power grid," said Mr. Liguori, speaking yesterday afternoon at the Ad Age Marketing and Technology Summit at Internet Week in New York.

Mr. Liguori joined a host of other marketers to discuss the new tech- and data-driven CMO and the increasing need for CMOs to work in tandem with CIOs to manage the vast swaths of data generated int his new era.

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AT&T is the country's fifth largest ad spender -- and now its using data gleaned from its own digital advertising to to help other marketers buying inventory through AT&T's AdWorks business.

The company is unveiling a new platform, called Blueprint, for targeted online, mobile and TV ads. However, the platform falls short of achieving what largely remains elusive for advertisers: a way to target one person or group of the same people across digital, mobile and traditional platforms. At the outset, there will be three Blueprint platforms: one for online, one for mobile and one for TV. Most notably, it will be using the intelligence it gathers from its own corporate digital ad efforts to inform the online Blueprint platform.

"We're both an ad network and an advertiser ... our ads show up in thousands of websites that go beyond our network. The nice thing about that is we can leverage that learning," said Maria Mandel Dunsche, head of marketing and media for AT&T's AdWorks. The company's own ads create 4 billion signals per month that it uses to identify audience segments and interest categories, said Ms. Mandel Dunsche.

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Imagine for a second that you could interview a product. How often is it being used? For how long? And where in the house does it live?

Sounds crazy, but it's increasingly probable as marketers mine for data beyond the usual places -- web browsers, loyalty programs and smartphones -- and capture information from pill packages, soda fountains and the most mundane of consumer implements, the toothbrush.

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Mozilla's plan to prevent third-party cookies by default is on pause. The company this week decided to test blocking third-party cookies by requiring users to enable the feature -- rather than automatically opting them in.

"There are many conflicting claims about how this patch will affect the Internet," wrote Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla.org and CTO and senior VP of engineering at Mozilla, in a post on his personal blog today.

"Why debate in theory what we can measure in practice? We are going to find out more and adjust course as needed. This is the essence of the release test cycle."

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Corporate influence on education is a touchy subject, but when it comes to data-science education, corporations and academics are commingling more and more.

Companies including General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, Hearst, Verizon, Yahoo, Independence Blue Cross and IBM are fostering symbiotic bonds with colleges and universities: Companies provide problems and the research data to potentially solve them, not to mention sponsorship dollars. The schools, in turn, create a well-trained data workforce with real-world business experience.

GM recently collaborated with IBM at Michigan State University, part of the school's MBA in analytics. The project brought together MSU students, IBM execs and Nathan Bruin-Slot, program manager for the GM Customer-Assistance and Relationship-Services initiative. Mr. Bruin-Slot worked on a weekly basis with students to produce analytics for improving the automaker's customer-ownership experience.

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The hype around data ain't all it's cracked up to be, and believe it or not, that's something that can be heard often from people who work in data-related fields.

Stewart Pratt, director of data and analytics at SapientNitro is one. Steeped in philosophy and economics, Mr. Pratt has unique theories on the world and data's role in it, combining a dedication to humility with a practical recognition of what data can -- and cannot -- do.

"When I speak about the humility of the modern data scientist, I'm referring to receptivity to the limits and role of big data," he said. "Big data can help us identify correlations we may have otherwise missed, but it isn't well-suited for helping us to understand causality or meaning."

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Want 2,000 gross rating points worth of paper-towel-brand switchers? It just got a lot easier.

Buying based on consumers' purchases rather than their ages or genders will take a leap forward with this upfront season, as Nielsen Catalina Solutions rolls out a self-service system that lets buyers and sellers run instant analyses to understand how heavily the "Modern Family" audience is weighted with facial-tissue-brand switchers, or how reliably repeat airings of "Braveheart" deliver heavy buyers of Pop-Tarts.

Since 2010 NCS has done 1,400 such analyses with around 150 marketers, 50 agencies and 40 media companies. But the workload, expected to double this year, has outpaced what it can do on its own, said CEO Mike Nazzaro. So the joint venture of research firm Nielsen and supermarket-loyalty and data-analytics firm Catalina is launching a self-service version, AdVantics on Demand.

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The Federal Trade Commission continues its crackdown on the consumer data industry. The agency today announced it sent warning letters to ten data brokers suggesting they may be in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The effort appears to be the result of an undercover data shopping operation.

The FTC "test-shopped" for data from the companies and determined that they may be in violation of the FCRA, according to the missives, dated last week.

The firms in the crosshairs are ConsumerBase, Brokers Data, US Data Corporation, Crimcheck.com, 4Nannies, U.S. Information Search, People Search Now, Case Breakers and USA People Search. The tenth company was not named by the FTC.

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Time Warner Cable, Hearst, HBO and Verizon are helping to fund the fledgling NYC Media Lab as part of a media-industry effort to encourage and benefit from research in the same way that tech companies already do.

NYC Media Lab, which fosters alliances between corporations and data and media researchers at the city's universities, is a collaboration among the New York City Economic Development Corp., Polytechnic Institute of New York University and Columbia University, modeled on existing media labs at MIT and Stanford. It opened its doors in 2010 with the help of a $250,000 commitment from the EDC, but in the past year has secured the four media companies' promises to provide $50,000 a year each for three years.

As paying charter members, the companies are afforded access to the findings of research work conducted on the behalf of other participants. "We're connecting our charter corporate members with students and faculty," said Roger Neal, executive direct at NYC Media Lab.

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