I have nothing to hide” - most of the people
a pregnant teenager being outed by the store Target, after it mined her purchase data – larger handbags, headache pills, tissues – and sent her a “congratulations” message as marketing, which her unknowing father got instead. Oops!
Don't confuse privacy with secrecy. I know what you do in the bathroom, but you still close the door. That’s because you want privacy, not secrecy.
I found this article very interesting about FB - http://www.salimvirani.com//facebook/
reply
>I have nothing to hide” - most of the people a pregnant teenager being outed by the store Target, after it mined her purchase data – larger handbags, headache pills, tissues – and sent her a “congratulations” message as marketing, which her unknowing father got instead. Oops!
Has this ever been proved or is it just an urban legend? I keep hearing this anecdote but I always thought it was fishy and could easily be explained by a simple coincidence. Like these people who claim that the Facebook app is listening to them continuously to match keywords for ads.
My girlfriend and I are in our early 30's, she's been regularly targeted for pregnancy-related products for the past 5 years at least. It seems that for most advertisers you don't need a super fancy algorithm harvesting thousands of data points, simply "woman age 25-35" is probably good enough to assume that pregnancy is likely. Undoubtedly Target has that information, they thought that it was plausible that she could be pregnant (or would be in the close future) so they sent pregnancy-related material. When it turned out that this person was actually pregnant they thought Target was surprisingly prescient. Of course that's not counting the hundreds of people who potentially received the same offer but were not actually pregnant and discarded it immediately as junk mail.
I'm sure the profiling takes place but this anecdote probably overplays how accurate these predictions are. Facebook and Google are in an other league though, they have access to so much more personal info, I'm sure these companies "know" many of their users better than any of their friends or relative ever will.
About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
Also, a bit later in the article, they realise that being explicit about what they're doing is bad, people do care, when it obviously happens to them:
Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Target realized soon after Pole perfected his model, could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?
Acxiom (and I assume many others too) infers women's menstrual cycles from retail purchases so they know when it is best to send them certain ads. One week its kittens and flowers, the next it'll be an attractive man, etc. This kind of deep data mining has been going on for decades. You voluntarily give this information up when you make purchases with loyalty cards.
It's called a loyalty card, not a "we'll spy on you to get you to spend more, the discounts aren't for your loyalty but to get you to use the card" card.
This is what so many people on the thread don't seem to get. Most normal people take this stuff at face value. They assume it does what it says on the tin. They apply human decency and an expectation of a normal human, fallible, porous memory to a frightening, insatiable industry that has no decency and an infinitely perfect memory.
Facebook, they assume, lets you connect to your friends. Facebook never say "in return for a free photo sharing and messaging system we will spy on everything you and your friends do, track everything you do on the internet, figure out what makes you tick, your loves, hates, wants, 'secret' desires, tie it all up in a bow and sell it to anyone who'll pay us, with your name, email and phone number attached".
I think you prove the point you're denying. You say you don't need fancy algos, but companies are wasting advertising on your gf by using basic indicators (age, sex) when in the Target case the advertising was, well, targeted.
If advertisers know what will get you to push the buy button then they can use that against you. Advertising pregnancy pants to those who aren't pregnant will almost always fail, and from the advertisers perspective it wastes an opportunity to push a product that you might buy.
It looks like the pregnant teenager thing may have originated as a theoretical example. However the story about Facebook publicising people’s recent purchases, including telling one guy’s wife about some Jewelry he bought, is absolutely true.
A little bit of research tells me that the story was entirely fictional. More of a case study / click bait of what might have happened. Media ran this shit out of it though. At least online. Eyeballs > integrity right?
As per my comment, the NYT ran a big article about it quoting Andrew Pole, a statistician who worked at Target. It specifically says that this really happened.
The part about the teenager in Minneapolis wasn’t from Pole. Re-read the article and you’ll notice that story isn’t attributed to anyone. It’s just stated. We have no idea where this story originated, whether it’s fact or fiction, and if it’s even related to Pole’s work or just a marketing snafu.
Don't confuse privacy with secrecy. I know what you do in the bathroom, but you still close the door. That’s because you want privacy, not secrecy. I found this article very interesting about FB - http://www.salimvirani.com//facebook/ reply