For large multinational companies, or even smaller outfits with modest aspirations of foreign expansion, the patchwork of global laws and regulations governing security and privacy can present a major compliance challenge.

As the Federal Trade Commission prepares to release a new framework of privacy principles to prod the Internet industry toward tighter protections for consumers' online data, one of the agency's commissioners said that she has grown particularly alarmed at the unchecked actions of data brokers to mine, analyze and potentially sell sensitive information.