Compared to intellectual property and cybersecurity, lawmakers have been fairly quiet in their address of the ever-contentious online privacy debate this year. Some of that hesitation has been the product of the continued efforts of industry groups to demonstrate that self-regulation can be an effective tool to protect privacy. It also owes to the fact that lawmakers had been anticipating the release of two major reports that would go a long way toward defining the administration's position on steps needed to protect online privacy.

Both reports, one from the White House and the Department of Commerce and the other from the Federal Trade Commission, materialized in the first quarter of 2012.

In February, the White House and Commerce Department that called for industry participation to give Internet users more visibility into how their information is collected and used, as well as tools to limit online tracking and profiling, including a do-not-track mechanism built into the Web browser. Following up on that framework, commerce officials are convening a series of talks with industry representatives, privacy advocates and other concerned parties to fine-tune the implementation of do-not-track and other self-regulatory guidelines in the hopes of garnering broad support among advertising players and Web companies.

A little more than a month after the White House framework dropped, the Federal Trade Commission , endorsing a similar self-regulatory approach, including the do-not-track mechanism. While both documents expressed the hope that self-regulation can achieve meaningful consumer protections and warned against overly prescriptive regulations that could chill innovation within the fast-moving Internet industry, they also suggested that Congress should develop legislation to codify baseline privacy safeguards.