Thanks to technological advances -- and a willing populace -- marketers these days have mountains of consumer data that in previous decades an overeager government could only dream of.

Is that so bad? For all the handwringing about online behavioral tracking, there have been precious few examples of nefarious outcomes. Would the increasingly worried government be right to step in? Or would that stifle the very "big data" innovation that marketers increasingly rely on?

Collecting data about customers is virtually as old as marketing itself, but the trillions of data points now available online make it a sophisticated piece of weaponry.

It's not very hard to see why this would be appealing to the CMO who doesn't think that the spray-and-pray of expensive TV advertising aimed at a massive but undefined audience is the best use of money.