The explosive growth of Internet advertisements has been accompanied by increased risks to consumers, including from the content of online disclosures regarding their purchases, the products and services that are provided and businesses' collection and use of their private data.

For example, advertisers now deploy a variety of digital advertising tools that help them identify and deliver content to "targeted" audiences that are more likely to act on the advertised products or services. These technologies permit the advertisers to collect and analyze users' "digital footprints" to determine the types of advertisements that are delivered to individual users. Many have expressed significant consumer privacy concerns about the practice because targeted ads often rely on behind-the-scenes collection and analysis of user data, which may or may not be disclosed by the business that is benefiting from that data.