Greetings!

I write these words from our annual Global Privacy Summit in Washington, DC, where privacy and data protection professionals have gathered to learn, teach and network about the issues we face each day.

The volume of these issues—and their complexity—is increasing. This is reflected in the number of practitioners in attendance and in the conversations they are having in breakout sessions, in hallways, at networking events and over dinner at the end of the day.

One of the big topics here this week is the provocative prospect of a do-not-track mechanism for the Internet. It has been on the minds of many since the Federal Trade Commission called for it in its December preliminary staff report. In this month's issue, we take a look at "do not track"--where it is, and where it's headed.

A recent ruling by the California Supreme Court also has privacy pros talking. The court ruled last month that merchants may not collect zip codes from credit card customers. The decision is expected to have a significant effect on California's retail industry, since the practice of collecting zip codes has become routine for marketing and lead-generation purposes. The decision has also prompted at least 106 class-action lawsuits due to the fact that the ruling applies retroactively.

As attorney Scott Koller, CIPP, noted in an article for the IAPP Privacy Advisor, "The court said, 'look, if you'd read the statute you'd have known that zip codes are personally identifying information.'"

In an article below, the chief privacy and security officer of a marketing automation company outlines some of the rules and regulations marketers need to know. Dennis Dayman presents the commonalities across many of these rules and says, "Compliance drives demand, leads and revenue."

As always, I hope you enjoy this month's edition of INSIDE 1to1: Privacy and find it useful to your work.

Sincerely,

J. Trevor Hughes, CIPP

President & CEO, IAPP