Anjali, thanks for the link. It was a delightfully refreshing and candid article that sounded a lot like Doc back in the Cluetrain days: "There is no demand for messages" (as in, "advertising messages").
A simply theory as to why "it isn't discussed more widely in the marketing industry as an issue": because at present there's: a) no incentive, and b) no alternative.
The fact that a large industry has grown up around spying electronically on consumers is simply a function of economics: businesses want to sell things, and to the extent that more information leads to more sales, businesses will buy it. The calf-cow-cookie Internet as it currently exists gave them a new source of information, and businesses are trying to see if they can sell more with it. (The jury is still out on that.)
Just as almost nobody payed attention to personal computers until they turned the computing industry on its head, almost nobody is going to pay attention to personal clouds until they turn the online marketing (and several other industries) on their head.
But once again, the driving force will simply be economics. Personal clouds will represent a new and better source of information (and customer relationships) to businesses. All that needs to happen is to deliver first-genereration personal clouds and let the personal cloud industry start evolving just like the personal computer industry did in the early '80s.
When that happens, cookies will be toast (so to speak ;-) Having a cookie connection to a consumer's browser will seem as antiquated as having a dedicated modem to a customer's minicomputer. What will really be valuable is a
personal channel to a customer's personal cloud. And that will only happen with the attendent shift in power that is VRM.
=Drummond