Thursday, November 13, 2008

The most profitable hacking target has always been your mind

A paper on the economics of massive advertising over email, and some numbers on the economics of massive advertising over search result pages. Both business models require sophisticated hardware infrastructures, but note that the search result pages-based implementation -due to the extra information in query terms- is much better targeted, and hence more profitable, than the email-based one (except when the advertiser has access to your mail history).

Obvious linear extrapolation: there'll be increased incentives to offer you online platforms to work, learn, and communicate, as the ever-growing volume and richness of the captured data allows more profitable advertising (or similar, think political campaigning, activism, etc) methods.

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