.. or if you're pregnant
I can see where this could cause some major problems, but it's also a fascinating look at human behavior and the issues involved in commercially tracking said behavior.
My mom said to me on the phone today, "I guess nothing we do is private any more." To some degree, what she's saying is right. Even as the Internet and computers in general make us a global community, aspects of that community take on those of the small town, where everyone knows each other's secrets, and privacy becomes increasingly scarce.
We can discuss whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, or whether there are measures we can take to mitigate it, but it's real and it's not going away any time soon. Which means we're either moving toward an era of tolerance and "live and let live," or else an era of forced conformity because people can learn so easily when you step out of line. #ddtb
Reshared post from +Terrence Lui
You Are Being "Targeted"
Not sure why anyone in this day and age would be surprised that companies like Target are data mining things like your shopping habits. Every time you hand over that loyalty card to the supermarket, you are allowing them to do the exact same thing.
I agree that this clearly crosses the line of "creepy". But even if Target stops sending out coupons and deals to people who have not self identified as being pregnant, I highly doubt the creepiness will stop. I believe most of this stuff is completely unintentional. Many companies who do this are just looking for patterns not specific demographics. Computers are crunching huge amounts of data and trying to find correlations. Maybe one day they find that there is a very tight correlation between people who buy grapes and people who use fabric softener. It might not make any sense to a human looking at the data, it might not even be real, (remember correlation does not imply causation) but that's the correlation that the computer finds.
I've developed programs that "automagically" find these types of correlations and promote specific actions over others to test it can illicit other behavior. The stuff I worked on was a lot more harmless than digging into someone's shopping or other personal behaviors but many of the same principles apply.
If this type of thing really creeps you out you could always move to a system to really hide your identity. Pay in cash, Make sure you use icognito mode, have many many e-mail addresses, etc. I'm not sure the inconvenience is worth it given I don't really think most of the data that is being amassed is all that dangerous to me.
Do you disagree? Are you worried about data mining like this?
Embedded Link
How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did – Forbes
Target has perfected the technique of analyzing consumers' shopping habits to figure out who's pregnant. How can they send customers congratulatory coupons without freaking them out?
I just think this is funny. What else do they think those club cards are for? Targeted (ha!) advertising. I get stuff from the grocery all the time though it is mostly for things I never use.
In general, I have no objections to targeted adverts — heck, if they want to sell me stuff that I'm more likely to want, why the heck not?
Where they start making predictions like this which have social consquences (see also the teen Facebook user who was outed as gay to his toss-him-out-of-the-house parents based on even more subtle patterns), there are consequences that need to be considered.