[bmer]

It is, in that it takes advantage of peoples' speculative nature.

"What if we had all this extra data on our customers?! Then we could do a lot more to make more money! So, it makes sense we ought to pay more for that data too!"

The data provider gets to profit based of this speculative "of course more information/more stuff is better!", while the data purchaser doesn't really have a chance to test whether their speculation is well-founded. (How precisely do you test what the causative effect of changes to your ad campaign are? If you make a change, and numbers go up, how do you separate numbers going up caused by any of the other parallel factors? It's hard to be scientific with advertising.)

The person selling the tool always wins, even if the tool is nothing more than a placebo effect. The person buying the tool on the other hand...well, good thing they have deep pockets, and don't really know how to spend their money well, and good thing too that there's always more more suckers ready to take their place (as long as we keep the birth rate up)!

[__loam]

It's a good point that data providers can make a profit opening this as a new revenue stream. We'll see how they end up working out for the end users of that data I guess.