Phishing for Marketing?

As I read the NYT article about the recent email security breach at Google, it struck me how spamming and phishing attacks are becoming increasingly personalized and I wondered if the same personalization we seek for creating an effective marketing campaign is being used to target internet newbies into divulging otherwise confidential information.

For instance, a lottery winning notification addressed to 'Dear User' can be easily caught by Spam filters and trashed. But when an email is addressed to you from a friend, and has other information relevant to you, it gets increasingly difficult to separate the spam from genuine emails. A similar example comes to mind where everyday on your Facebook wall you can see dozens of your friends 'liking'strange videos or articles. While you would ordinarily have ignored or suspected such a link on a random website, knowing that its published by a friend lets down your guard and prompts you to click.

As an avid online shopper, I subscribe to a great many retail newsletters and generally didn't hesitate from providing my very basic information (gender, age group, likes, dislikes) for the retailers to send me more 'personalized' deals and information. However in the light of increasing security breaches and identity thefts, I wonder if all the targeted marketing I seek will come at a cost....