Late last year, the online community came to see the first major implementations of behavioral targeting with FaceBook's release of the Beacon program. Though subsequently rolled back, the program brought to light the sensitive issue around targeting users with ads.

Currently, most web based firms thrive on ad revenue or rather eye-ball revenue. The more the number of subscribers to a service, the greater the viewers for ads. Also, the greatest success for online advertisements has been the ability to target audience with relevant ads. These are based on the intent driven advertising principles.

Google has been a leader in this segment - streaming ads to pages based on the keywords entered by the user. But there are certain limitations to ads in this format. For more accurate targeting firms are increasing looking to adopt techniques that decipher patterns in user behavior online.

As opposed to other media for dissemination of information, internet has the advantage of being interactive, as in: You can be tracked. User behavior can be fed back into a cycle that could be used to target users more accurately.

Though the pull back of the beacon service from Facebook has been a victory for users in general, there is reason to believe that such programs, even in a stealth mode, will not surface in future. All is Hunky Dory when the investments are ringing in. But when a crunch time comes, perhaps firms will have no choice but to have their users accept the behavioral monitoring or pay up for the service.

Consider this scenario - with most of your connectivity moving online, what cost would you be ready to pay to keep things as they are?