Media: Cranky User looks at a Dangerous Innovation in Marketing

"Ease-of-use or marketing-driven sabotage" explores the cavalier behaviour of a company with a product that can interject advertising into requests for webpages.

Peter Seebach considers the ethics and explains the problem well: 'So in this system, every eight hours a randomly selected device from a set of devices will receive a Web page that's an ad instead of snagging useful, business-related information. The results can range from amusing (maybe it's an airport departure schedule listing) to inconvenient (maybe you're in a hurry at the airport) to fatal (maybe it's a piece of medical equipment).

'The idea - that it could be okay to reroute a user's request without any kind of permission or confirmation - is a strange one. What if the user was trying to communicate with a bank or otherwise had private or secret information in the HTTP request?'

Associated Link: IBM's Cranky User: Ease-of-use or marketing-driven sabotage

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