[mungoid]

I definitely agree. And for some reason your comment reminded me of something a sales guy who used to work for a fairly large online company told me. He said the way they see it, is that it's similar to a company sending out kiosks to a bunch of different stores to offer samples. They aren't really trying to make a ton of sales at those kiosks, they are mainly after the demographic info about the customers who seemed most interested, and the stores they got the most hits at.

While I see what he was getting at, I think it is a somewhat weak analogy because if those kiosk people were like online ads, then on top of just keeping track of visible statistics like age, race, gender, etc. They would be also snooping around your purse or wallet, tracking where you came from, car you drive, etc. and then bundling all that data from all the kiosks to sell to some other company for marketing purposes.

I never really felt like arguing back with him because he's a sales person and I'm terrible at that, but it really didn't surprise me too much that they would think its just as innocuous as the Pepperidge Farm guy offering cheese samples at a grocery store.