My feelings on ads are fairly straightforward. Use them if you like, but be prepared to give me and other users an opt out option — an opt out that involves either the ability to pay for an ad-free solution or for me not to use the service, should I choose.

It seems that Yahoo and HP might be potentially crossing this line a bit. Now anything I come up with here is speculation at this point, but here is how this latest bit of news appears to be rolling forward.

Yahoo and HP are working together to send ads on printed documents, for their ePrint Web-connected printers. So it sounds like something folks are able to opt in and out of. The problem is: why would anyone want this? Would we not consider this spam?

I’d like to lean with no, but I am concerned how non-Yahoo content might be able to take advantage of this to spam folks. So to be clear, not Yahoo spamming folks, but those malicious types who may be able to potentially abuse this kind of technology.

So where is it all heading? I think that if this concept is done wrong, we may see the same double edged sword as with email — easy to spam.

[Photo above by allspice1 / CC BY-ND 2.0]

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