Less than 50 years ago, the average family owned one telephone, one or two televisions and a few radios. However, today the average household has at least five devices that need an internet connection. In addition, as many as six percent of households own at least 15 such devices including smartphones, tablets, televisions, gaming consoles; even digital photo frames. This makes life much easier for everyone. However, can there be a bad side to being so dependent on technology?

Suppose you are an ad-serving company and you maintain a log of cookie data for ads you serve to the web pages for a particular vendor (say amazon). a. how can you use this data to determine which are the best ads? b. how can you use this data to determine which are the best ad formats? c. how could you records of past ads and ad clicks to determine which ads to send to a given ip address? d. how could you use this data to determine how well the technique you used in your answer to part c was working? e. how could you use this data to determine that a given ip address is used by more than one person? f. how does having this data give you a competitive advantage vis-à-vis other ad-serving companies?