McAfee recently ran an experiment involving a set of people opening themselves up to spam by clicking on things they normally would not.

The results have been analysed and show that spam has moved more towards targetted advertising. With such an abundance of this, people will become very wary of anything advertised to them that is acutely targetted at them. Users will be avoiding such adverts for fear of becoming victims of fraud and/or identity theft. No click, no sale. Marketers and the like will need to rethink their strategies and actually build trusting fan bases instead of blatantly abusing people. Yes, do some hard work for a change.

In addition to this problem, I've discovered that targetted behavioural advertising can compound mental illnesses from what I've observed. I call for more research into the potential harmful effects of targetted advertising.