Forbes has an interesting piece that will make you think twice before sliding your debit card:
Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.
Charles Duhigg outlines in the New York Times how Target tries to hook parents-to-be at that crucial moment before they turn into rampant — and loyal — buyers of all things pastel, plastic, and miniature. He talked to Target statistician Andrew Pole — before Target freaked out and cut off all communications — about the clues to a customer’s impending bundle of joy. Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they’ve bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources. Using that, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past.
Many of us purchase soap and cotton balls. However, if we buy scent-free soap, jumbo bags of cotton balls, hand sanitizers, and washcloths, we might be ready to deliver a baby. In fact, their collection of information about their customers is so eerily accurate they’ve even had to camouflage their data so customers don’t feel as if they’ve been spied on. In one anecdote, a teenage girl started getting coupons for cribs and baby-related items. This understandably irritated her father, who stormed into Target demanding they stop encouraging his teenager to get pregnant.
Turns out, Target’s number crunchers knew more about what had been going on in his house than he did.
Read the rest here if you have the stomach for it.
— Nancy French is the editor of the Patheos Faith and Family Portal, where this article first appeared.
If the teenager was under 18, the only way she got a debit or credit card was with her parents' approval. They weren't watching what she was buying with it? I'm not entirely certain why people are angry at Target because a father didn't talk to his teenager/got lied to by her?
(I buy cat litter. They send me coupons for cat litter. I buy more cat litter. Oooh, creepy.)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe reason it's newsworthy is that they are growing more sophisticated in putting unrelated things together to infer probabilities.
It's a no-brainer that if you buy cat litter, you're probably a cat owner. It's not so clear that if you buy cotton balls, you must be pregnant. Most people who buy cotton balls are not pregnant. But when you mix cotton balls plus three or four other products together, you get a higher probability.
As another commenter said, I like targeted advertising better, as well. But there is a downside to it, a certain vulnerability that comes with having your most intimate information be readily available to strangers. The people who do this stuff have already figured out how to gain some surprisingly personal information from seemingly benign sources. It might be news (of the unpleasant sort) to a lot of people that total strangers (or future employers) can derive personal information from seemingly unrelated data details that, in themselves, mean nothing - but taken collectively (with some sophisticated data mining techniques) can reveal enough to cause a lot of trouble.
I don't mind targeted ads, but I do worry that there could be problems in the future, as we increasingly become a society where powerful individuals can find out whether you're gay or straight, conservative or liberal, what religion you are (and whether you're devout), whether you're in a relationship or not, whether that relationship is healthy (if it exists), or what your race or ethnic background is.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOf course, when looked at from the "glass is half full" perspective, at least it wasn't a Planned Parenthood coupon (which would admittedly be a much tougher camouflage, I would think).
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOK, weird case. But I'm not sure I see an issue. I'm OK with more ads for products I might be interested in and less ads for things I'm not interested in.
"Charles Duhigg outlines in the New York Times how Target tries to hook parents-to-be at that crucial moment before they turn into rampant — and loyal — buyers of all things pastel, plastic, and miniature." A bit breathlessly overstated, don't you think? Hook? They're not selling crack, for goodness sake. They're offering a product that they think you might want. If you don't, don't buy it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI kind of like targeted advertising. One downside though is that it makes the temptation stronger. One of the dresses that I really want keeps chasing me around the internet. Buy me, buy me. It is better than getting annoying ads. If my data gets used to create a new product then that would be great too if it is something that would make my life better.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOlivia, you might be right... that it's all harmless and it really is more convenient because you get coupons for things you could really use. I just keep thinking back to -- was it -- Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court hearings when they brought up movies he'd rented over this lifetime? it just seems a little Orwellian...
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