Many questions were raised recently, for instance, when DoubleClick purchased Abacus, a mailing list data company, and consumers began to feel an Orwellian dis-ease. I think issues of privacy are going to come under increased scrutiny. It's a time bomb. Others are less concerned. If you don't allow yourself to be tracked and to be personalized, if you turn off the cookies on your machine, then you're not going to have shopping baskets that remember what you bought last week.
People can make that choice.
It has a market price, and once we realize what it will fetch, some of us will decide to sell it. Still, everyone agrees that there must be some regulation. If Web users cannot be guaranteed that their confidentiality will be maintained, they will abandon online brands that they've become loyal to and gravitate to sites and brands that are known for guaranteeing privacy. IPOs have raised a lot of money that has been spent on marketing brands through traditional offline media rather than online. The building of brands has played out in an interesting manner on the Internet.