Privacy groups have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission regarding behvaioral advertising practices, according to this Network World report.

The complaint, filed Thursday by the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), U.S. PIRG and the World Privacy Forum, centers around the practice of real-time trading and sale of individual Internet users’ profiles, based on their interests and surfing habits. The growing and little understood practice, combined with targeted ad vendors incorporating a wider range of outside data sources to build user profiles, constitutes a major privacy violation, the groups said in their complaint.

Here’s one report that discusses behavioral advertising’s use in politics.