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Federal Trade Commission commissioner Jon Leibowitz is concerned. And not just about his obnoxiously redundant job title. In a "town hall" meeting held yesterday in Washington on the topic of online advertising and behavioral targeting, Leibowitz hinted that the agency might soon require users opt into behavioral targeting. Reportedly, executives from Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo were there to talk Leibowitz down from the ledge. This could be bad news for all them, but especially Facebook.

Google doesn't want to have to deal with this issue now, because one of the main reasons it acquired DoubleClick was for its behavioral targeting innovations. Much of Yahoo's advertising is already targeted to users based on they way they use its site.

But Leibowitz's sudden concerns come at particularly bad time for Microsoft and its new investment, Facebook. Facebook, rumor has it, is planning to announce a new behavioral targeting ad network, called SocialAds, next Tuesday in New York. Its master plan is to track the data users input into their profiles as well as the implicit information they communicate by interacting with other members. They'll then use the combined dataset to target these same users with relevant advertising as they visit other sites across the Internet.

But Leibowitz's concerns could quash all that. The FTC might demand that Facebook ask users to take part in such tracking before it can use their data. Obviously, it's unclear how likely Facebook users would be to opt into behavioral targeting. As this video indicates, there are at least some users paranoid enough to reject the idea.

To be fair, you have to wonder how many Facebook users smoke pot and dream up paranoid visions of what megacorporations will do with a list of their favorite books. It's hard to tell. Most probably don't care.

My guess is, that most new users will continue to click any check box Facebook puts on the screen during signup, including an opt-in for behavioral targeting. There's social pressure to join Facebook and it is much more powerful than abstract privacy concerns.

Leibowitz said yesterday that only 1 percent of all high school graduates actually understand privacy agreements when they read them. If Facebook members don't bother to understand what they're signing up for now, I doubt they will in the future.

Probably the only way Facebook could screw up this state of ignorance — blissful for the social network, at any rate — would be for the company to allow employees to abuse it.

Unfortunately for Zuckerberg and company, we've heard Facebook employees do muck around with private user information. The Silicon Valley sin here is that they aren't doing it to make money — they're doing it for their own entertainment.

Facebook has not officially said it's begun an internal investigation, but unless the activity stops, I'm sure we'll keep hearing about it. And so will Leibowitz. Facebook had better take this behavior seriously, or the FTC is going to strictly limit how it gets to use for its business what its employees look at for kicks.