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From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services
(www.engadget.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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At that time I honestly doubt NetZero was scanning my emails to deliver targeted ads. Doing that required hiring teams of engineers to write the software to do the scanning, scoring, and then mapping advertisers to specific customer groups. Its non trivial.
Most ISPs didn't have the money or the foresight to do that.
I don't know who NetZero are/were, but a number of UK ISPs were selling email and browser keywords to advertisers in the early aughts, including big players like BT and FreeServe. Some even tried to launch a project that would use DPI to inspect all web and email traffic and dynamically inject ads into email and webpages.