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How Companies Learn Your Secrets
Hugh Pickens writes "For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Now the NY Times Magazine reports on how companies like Target identify those unique moments in consumers' lives when their shopping habits become particularly flexible and the right advertisement or coupon can cause them to begin spending in new ways. Among life events, none are more important than the arrival of a baby, and new parents are a retailer's holy grail. In 2002, marketers at Target asked statisticians to answer an odd question: 'If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn't want us to know, can you do that?' Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. 'We knew that if we could identify them in their second trimester, there's a good chance we could capture them for years,' says statistician Andrew Pole. 'As soon as we get them buying diapers from us, they're going to start buying everything else too.' As Pole's computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a 'pregnancy prediction' score and he soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. 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. '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 apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again but the father was somewhat abashed. '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.'"
You underestimate the power of directed advertising. To give you a hint, that's what makes Facebook worth and estimated $100 billion.
Nah, this is real. And it will work out just as well as the last time.
OK guys, raise your hands - how many have gotten 'feminine products' adverts?
Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
But not terribly surprising.
Given the opportunity, marketers will be more observant of the goings-on in a household than, say, the father of the house.
Hell, I am the father of the house, and most stuff that happens catches me by surprise. So I can sympathize with the father mentioned at the end of TFS.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Back when retailers had a more personal connection to their clients, it was also not uncommon for a shopkeeper to notice that a customer was pregnant and stock something specifically for her. Personalization has always existed; this is a more of a comeback than something completely new.
The flipside is that a shopkeeper also had a personal connection to the mother. Target has no such connection to Customer#9810957065409. This takes the personalization away from 'cozy' toward 'creepy'. It's like the uncanny valley of interactions.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Except that it actually happened. I work in a biomedical informatics group and the same techniques we use to find features that can detect early infection in cells can be applied to marketing data. If you have enough training data, for example, start with 2000 known customers who started buying diapers and formula on a certain date. Now what did they start buying seven months before that? Now find the customers who match that profile. Data are data.
This is a boring sig
The anecdote might be fake, but the use of stats? More than you can imagine. The fact is, human behavior is predictable.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
OK guys, raise your hands - how many have gotten 'feminine products' adverts?
Uhh... Dude... I don't know what kind of web sites YOU visit, but...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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Coincidentally, the FBI now lists as suspicious activity making purchases with cash.
Almost all forums have rules against personal attacks. You'd commonly be banned for posting someone else's "IRL" (in real life) information. Yet here we see corporations doing exactly that for nothing more than profit. Data-mining like this is the beginning of an assault on our right to be "secure in our persons" and enjoy privacy.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
Why do you find it so surprising that they do a good enough job of detecting pregnancy that after the better part of a decade they'll have found a case where the girl's father didn't know yet? Keep in mind that the girl is probably trying a lot harder to keep it a secret from her father than she is the store. Especially if he's the type that gets upset enough over stupid coupons implying potential pregnancy to go yell at a store manager? Yeah, I'm sure he's the first person she would tell.
Honestly, I expect this happens quite a lot, but most people aren't hotheaded enough to go yell at a store manager about coupons. (Who would then have to call the them back a couple days later? That strikes me as more creepy than the preggo-score.)
Have you ever checked your mail? Notice how it's literally full of completely untargeted advertising? If that's profitable, how could this possibly not be?
No you don't. You hate seeing marketing material that wasn't meant for you. I feel the same way. Personally, I love the marketing material that's on the boxes of plastic toys I purchase.
Just like TFA, two months ago gmail started serving me nothing but breast pump, neonatal vitamin, and baby bottle ads. I'm a guy, but I am married so maybe they're trying to send a hint "why don't you have kids yet? Here we'll give you discount mail-order vitamins if you get busy!" But they also send me dating site ads. So if they do know I'm married, they don't have a high opinion of my marriage! Maybe that's why they want me to knock my wife up? ;)
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I practice yoga regularly. My mat wore out, so I was looking for a replacement. (I'm taller than the normally-sized 68" mats, so story of my life, I have to get something 4" bigger.) My job is military contracting.
The combination of yoga + weaponry apparently triggers a profile of "interested in single men".
Google thinks I'm gay... or possibly a woman, I'm not sure.
(It's IE at work. I don't get ads at home.)
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
People often forget there client card at my super market (AH) and I happily lend them mine. Must give them some interesting stats.
The problem is that marketeers really think this matter. Lets examine this particular case for just how idiotic it is.
Target profiles its EXISTING customers to be able to bombard them with coupons for products these same customers already pass everyday... Can win these customers for live? YOU ALREADY GOT THEM! And now instead of them buying the products they already seen at full price, you are reducing the price for no good reason.
TV shows just how desperate marketeers are to prove they matter, the program you are watching interrupted by ads, for the program you were trying to watch followed by overlays of the next program, so please stay tuned... I would if you didn't ruin the program with all this begging. It is like going to a restaurant and having the chef come over after every bite to ask if you are enjoying yourself.
Marketing doesn't sell products, marketing sells marketing. I am not saying ads don't work but rather that the constant overloading of ads, does not work. Check this for yourself, if an adblock takes longer then it used to, do you continue watching? Once ads were singular, to short to flick away. But the "going to the toilet" during the advertising is now a way of life and has been for decades. And here poor advertisers are trying to sell their products to viewers who are studying their toilet door.
Myself? I barely bother with TV anymore. If for some masochistic reason I want to see what happens, I download it and get rid of ads altogether. I have ad block installed and ghostery. NOT because I mind being tracked so much but because I just can't stand the interuptions and delays that slow ads and scripts cause.
This Target campaign targets existing customers into buy stuff they have to buy anyway and ignores new customers altogether... BRILLIANT. I know how effective it is, some marketeers and statisticians got payed big bugs. Mission accomplished. Any actual new customers that make up for the costs and potential lawsuits? (Oh you just wait till they get it wrong or target a woman who had an abortion, or didn't want her family to know or had a miscarriage).
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again [...]
I know this is slashdot, it might be ok to not read TFA, but it seems you didn't even read the fine submission!
... from the forgotten corner in europe
Oh, I assure you it is not BS. I took a graduate level DBMS class and the book for the class has a chapter on data mining. This was a specific example given as to the uses of data mining. Hell, this guy probably used the exact same algorithms from that book to do it.
Maybe this is what AARP has been doing. They've been sending me invitations to join their organization for years, ever since I was in my 20's. Undoubtedly their data mining algorithms determined that I would one day reach retirement age, so they are doing everything they can to "capture" me now!
OK guys, raise your hands - how many have gotten 'feminine products' adverts?
That, and worse. It's partly a consequence of the whole family sharing the same IP address in conjunction with quasi-safe browsing habits.
We all have different logon accounts on each of several PCs, and we tend to use more than one browser per person (mostly Opera, Firefox, Chromium). However, both my wife and I have shown the kids how to get their browsers to automatically delete cookies and LSOs on terminating a session, and encourage them to clear private data regularly. So essentially all the vendors have to go on is the IP address, since the cookies are new every visit.
The only one that bugs me is the "daily deal" ad shown at one weather web site, which invariably shows me a picture of a tray of sushi (one of my favorite foods). I don't recall doing any online searching/browsing/shopping for sushi, and doubt if the "daily deal" even has a place offering sushi within 200km of me.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I'm a rather young man and I only seem to get things in the mail from the AARP, AAA and Medicare Providers. Maybe it was that sweatervest I bought.
I'm convinced that Walmart does this kind of data mining too. As soon as I walk into the store, their computer systems identify me, figure out what I'm about to buy, and make SURE that item is already sold out!
(Who would then have to call the them back a couple days later? That strikes me as more creepy than the preggo-score.)
Maybe the manager asked for the telephone number when the guy came to complain so that he could call back a couple days later and offer them some kind of conciliatory special deal at the store (like discounts on something). On the other hand, maybe the manager was trying to arrange for the guy's family to no longer get (at the time, presumed faulty) targeted advertising, and was calling back to give them an update on the process (once again having explicitly asked for contact information for just this purpose). I don't know if it was actually creepy. We don't know enough details to come to a conclusion about that, I think.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
Or your wife has been cheating on you, and Google has figured it out already and is trying to get you to get your act together. They've also figured out that the son of a bitch got her pregnant, even though she's still trying to hide that from you, hence those ads.
There are ads on Facebook? Really?
(hugs his ABP)
The marketing campaign tries to get customers to buy new different products based on their past purchases. They want to identify pregnant women so they can encourage them to buy products at Target once they have a baby, instead of the customer shopping at a competitor for their baby needs.
Target figured out that people change their shopping habits the most when they had a baby, so it provides them with the biggest opportunity to win over customers. Knowing that someone is pregnant is marketing gold. The methods are based of research and the evidence is supported in Target's sales. It isn't just a bunch of BS.
Lets have a fictional person called Phil (a victim) and Bob (the guy posting the info) for the purpose of this post.
If Bob posts Phil's name, address, and phone number in a message board without Phil's permission, there is most likely some kind of hostile intent. This usually happens when Phil has managed to make Bob angry for some stupid reason (flame war, abortion debate, maybe Phil is just being a jackass here. Who knows? The reason is not relevant). So Bob gets Phil's info and posts it online in that message board. Why does Bob do this?
Most likely, Bob is hoping someone will go to Phil's house and beat him up. Or break a few windows. Maybe Bob just wants someone to take a crap in a paper bag, light it on fire, and throw it on Phils porch. The intent is to make it easy for all of Phils enemies to harass or inflict harm on Phil.
Target or Walmart do not have any hostile intent. They just want to sell you stuff. They gather and analyze data, and the only objective harm thaty they would intentionally cause is filling your mail box with unwanted spam. I would agree that doing so should earn someone a kick in the nuts anyway, but it is only annoying, not dangerous. In many cases they are using info they gathered themselves for their own benefit. It could also be argued that what they are doing is of mutual benefit: Walmart gets Phil to buy stuff, Phil will have a chance to buy something he wants.
The only problem for Phil is when access to that data is then sold, shared , or illegally accessed by those whose interests may run against him. There needs to be legal protections in place for Phil, and Walmart needs to be held responsible for any harm that comes of them keeping that database.
END COMMUNICATION
Just like TFA, two months ago gmail started serving me nothing but breast pump, neonatal vitamin, and baby bottle ads. I'm a guy, but I am married so maybe they're trying to send a hint "why don't you have kids yet? Here we'll give you discount mail-order vitamins if you get busy!" But they also send me dating site ads. So if they do know I'm married, they don't have a high opinion of my marriage! Maybe that's why they want me to knock my wife up? ;)
Google's ads are based on the email you are reading or other things on your screen. For example, I see ads for the delicious meat-like product Spam when I'm on the Spam page (then again, Google does have a sense of humor). So for a fun exercise, try to find out what it is in your email is triggering the ad you are receiving.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
It's usually not the store that does it (alone). I worked data storage for a company that pulls customer buying information from grocery stores, retail outlets, large financial institutions, well, just about from everyone. Major banks foward them your credit card sweeps about the same time it shows up on your online statement. Last I was there, roughly three years ago, they had 87 ASSUMED data fields on over 30 million consumers, which were extrememly accurate. 12 employees to support a 7 TB oracle RAC.
Just like TFA, two months ago gmail started serving me nothing but breast pump, neonatal vitamin, and baby bottle ads. I'm a guy, but I am married so maybe they're trying to send a hint "why don't you have kids yet? Here we'll give you discount mail-order vitamins if you get busy!" But they also send me dating site ads. So if they do know I'm married, they don't have a high opinion of my marriage! Maybe that's why they want me to knock my wife up? ;)
Soo... how much more competitive would their prices be, if they didn't spend money on these kinds of systems and marketing and customer tracking, and just accepted that there's nothing wrong with people buying what they want, when they decide they want it? Think they could undercut (or nearly undercut) Wal-mart while providing a more pleasant shopping experience (which wouldn't be hard)?
Consider all the effort it takes to design systems like this, to hire employees to use and maintain them, to purchase the equipment, to pay for data centers, etc. I mean if a woman gives birth she's going to be buying diapers; if she likes your store she'll buy them there on her own without this sort of manipulation. Then there's the cost of ill will -- the desire to treat my private life like your personal marketing brochure without even showing me the basic respect of asking for my permission strongly disinclines me to do business with you. It's called dignity, and I realize it's going out of style but it isn't dead yet.
So is this truly profitable in the long run, as a business practice? Or is it just another "make this quarter's numbers look good, the 'consumers' are used to bending over and taking this kind of thing anyway" type of deal?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
But cash has serial numbers! Production dates! Traceability through the Fed and member banks down to the ATM you withdrew from, and the account you used to withdraw, and who has been paying money into that account.
I post this kidding around, but I have to wonder if there has even been a truly dedicated group of people who have set to track a person that they could audit cash. I guess I'll know if I see a cashier scanning the bills I pay with.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Pay cash. That ends their data mining at Target (and Walmart, and everyone else).
Don't count on it. For one thing Target has been installing license plate scanners in all their parking lots - ostensibly for "customer safety." But if you are in the habit of purchasing the same combination of products on most of your trips to the store all they need to do is compare that "purchase fingerprint" with the list of cars in the parking lot at the time and after a few iterations they will be able to link your license plate with your purchasing habits.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Or Facebook and the advertisers overestimate it. For many of the things advertised (that aren't click-through buys) there's no way to know if the ads work. The ad sellers exploit this fact.
When coke shows you a coke advert they really have no way to know if you wander off to the corner store and buy one or not. I suspect for many large companies you could virtually eliminate advertising and not change sales one iota.
Ironically it's the sort of tracking in this article that might eventually prove it.
Track who buys what by Credit Card #.
That is a pretty shady area. There are some pretty strict laws about when and how credit card data is to be stored. I don't think brick and mortars are allowed to store CC#s at all. Then there is the matter of tying that information back to an address. Unless you are doing this online, or you willing gave them your address, then there should be no legal way for them to tie a credit card number to an address. Of course, maybe in this case they were using a Target credit card in which case they probably do have the address.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Lying with statistics is an art, but it appears that once in a while they can be useful.
How is this "lying"? Seems to mee they are spot on.
That isn't what he said at all.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Absolutely detestable.
Why is this detestable? "Detestable" is Comcast sending me mail at least once a week for the last three years, despite the fact that I don't watch TV, have no use for their services, and have never responded to anything they sent. Or American Express checking my credit rating nearly ten times in the space of a few years, and bombarding me with credit card offers. I already have two cards, assholes, and that's at least one more than I need. If I call a girl twice and she doesn't call me back, I get the hint and move on, but you people just keep on trying.
I hate shopping, and untargeted advertising rarely appeals to me; I'd much rather have companies with whom I have an existing customer relationship tell me about deals that I can actually use. Safeway lets me know when they have sales on frozen chicken breasts or nonfat milk; Amazon suggests books on history and programming that I might enjoy. None of this bothers me, because I don't buy anything from these stores that I'd feel uncomfortable about. (That said, if I buy birth control I'll pay cash and not use any customer loyalty cards. Private is private.) I don't want them sharing my shopping history with anyone - and I fully support laws that limit their ability to do so - but why shouldn't they try to cater to my habits? The fact is, they'd be idiots not to, and I'd be doing exactly the same thing if I were in their position. This isn't creepy or weird, it's how to run a profitable business without exploiting your workers or screwing your competitors.
Really, the only thing that bothers me is how private this data stays. As long as it's strictly internal and automated, I have no problem with them mining it for every useful correlation. But there is incredible potential for abuse, and not just selling this data to other companies: what if state governments start suing Amazon demanding to know the shopping records of everyone in their state so they can charge use taxes? (I'm not making that up - it really has happened, only it was an online vendor of cigarettes.) The data need not necessarily leave the company; I could imagine unscrupulous employees looking into the data for their neighbors, and wondering why the married man down the street was suddenly spending a lot of money on condoms and flowers.
try to find out what it is in your email is triggering the ad you are receiving.
Probably the Days of our Lives listserv.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
No you don't. You hate seeing marketing material that wasn't meant for you. I feel the same way. Personally, I love the marketing material that's on the boxes of plastic toys I purchase.
The fact that you would presume to know better than he what he does and doesn't hate means you certainly do believe in marketing. That presumption carries a burden of proof, and the fact that you feel differently does not constitute proof.
The hinge of marketing is that it relies on emotional manipulation. It's least effective on people who have emotions (since they have a pulse) but are not governed by them and do not make decisions according to them. That's why they use small children in commercials, especially for cars and other things that don't have much to do with child care -- they are exploiting the innocence and the cuteness of the child to tug at your heartstrings. Since people tend to have maternal and paternal instincts, and instinct is not a matter of reason, this one is particularly effective and requires a real self-awareness to be seen for what it is.
If it works, they bypass any kind of rationality and implant a subconscious identification, a transferrance of the warm fuzzies to the product being sold. They are not saying "here are the factual reasons why we believe our products are superior" for they may not have any. If it doesn't work, it's because the recipient can see how underhanded and infernal this kind of manipulation really is, how much contempt and disrespect for the potential customer it really shows, and becomes completely turned off to doing business with that company at all.
Which one happens depends on whether the person governs their emotions and passions or is governed by them, and that's simply a matter of having two things: a spine and some character. Marketers help to undermine these two things by constantly emphasizing and legitimizing their opposites. The only thing worse than a few marketers who may merely be selfish are the masses of enablers who think this is truly a noble and acceptable way to treat one's fellow men. Of course, they would have to feel that way, because that's easier for an unprincipled ego than admitting it has strings that someone else can pull.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Target or Walmart do not have any hostile intent. They just want to sell you stuff.
Yeah, buts let's just parse out the term "sell" a bit. They want you give them the maximum amount of your money in exchange for the least amount of value. Its not about finding out what you need/want, because they could just ask you that. Its about manipulating your perception of your own desires so that you "want" to buy as much as possible of the highest margin possible goods.
Not hostile?
This is why I oppose targeted advertising.
As if walmarted advertising is any better.
That kind of link would only be possible under the following conditions;
1. You would have to purchase the exact same list every time you went there. A different list would create a instance of you car there but no identifying list.
2. Noone else could purchase exactly the same list of items; An instance of the list being purchased without you car being there.
At best there could be a probable link.
The other issue is that there are hundreds of different lists purchased every day and hundreds of different cars parked in the lot ever day which creates a huge mamy to many relationship. Trying to link lists to cars is almot impossible.
Who is to say you even went into the store as many Targets are in malls.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What a wonderful, mature, high-minded reason to bring a child into the world...
I'm guessing you didn't grow up in a family, or in a family where family is actually considered important. Especially one where there's a lot of little brothers or sisters in it.
Ah, so you could not refute what I said, yet you still didn't like the way it sounded, so now here come the thinly-veiled personal attacks concerning how inferior my life or my family must be. How transparent of you.
My answer to you is very simple. I grew up in and remain in a family where family is considered very important. It's so important, in fact, that we don't make petty "me too!" games and contests of "I got first place!" out of important life events, particularly those as life-changing as becoming a parent.
The family? Very important. Who did what first as if it's a competition? So unimportant that it isn't even on the radar.
No here's the part you don't want to face: if two women in your family actually care about who gets pregnant first, to the point that they will try to become pregnant when one or more of them otherwise wouldn't have done so, the importance of family is low on their list. High up on their list is being petty, catty, and soaking up the attention and adoration from everyone else. If pointing that out offends you, or if you're struck by the realization that there are a lot of petty immature people in the world, then maybe you should deal with that on your own terms instead of trying to make a scapegoat of me.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
And the fact the web is killing retail makes all this sound so meaningless. Wow they can pickup human behavior and manipulate it to try and get a sale, yet the retail sector is recording record low sales...
Now I'm picturing something like:
You searched for: "I want my mat to be 4" bigger"
Did you mean: "I want my Matt to be 4" bigger"
Yes, the practice is very profitable, up to a point. For example, I no longer shop at Harvey Norman because of their intrusive data collection, I don't want to fill out what amounts to a fucking census form just for the privilege of being their customer. Worst still from a dignity POV, don't bullshit me and tell me the data collection is for my benefit should I wish to return the product when we both know that it's for marketing purposes and the receipt is all I need to enforce my consumer rights.
Targeted ads on the internet don't bother me at all because I am getting the indirect benefit of free content. I also find it interesting and sometimes amusing which topics the algorithms pick. They've worked out I'm an old fart living in Melbourne, but they are yet to work out I lost interest in dating sites a decade ago.
As a general rule, people are naturally adverse to being watched or followed. It's not just the social construct of dignity, it's an evolutionary thing that helped their ancestors to survive aggressive neighbours and hungry predators, it most likely goes back to a time long before we were even human. However, evolution is a hypocritical bitch since people generally have no qualms about covertly watching/following others, particularly when they think their subject is "up to no good" or is adorned with a "fine ass".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I thought charges like "negligence" and "reckless endangerment" were already crimes where the perpetrator didn't need to have criminal intent. That's sort of the point of having those charges along with "abuse" and "assault" - in the former the perpetrator should have known what they were doing was wrong (but didn't) while in the latter the perpetrator clearly knew it was wrong.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
advertising isn't about getting people to spend then and there; its merely brand recognition, so that when you do go to the store you're not buying something that nobody else will, which consumers seem to care about. its manipulation of our desire for social status; our perceived need for "stuff" that might make us seem cooler to our friends. its pretty scary if you think about it. market research is more psychology.
where it really gets creepy is their study of children in order to manipulate the spending of parents
Or they were buying condoms, just they were getting the cheap kind or the ones on clearance.
Try our new, and improved, swiss cheese condoms.
I think you can actually make some tentative links. For example, if you have some product that sells very rarely and you take the intersection of the sets of cars that are in the parking lot whenever that product is sold, if that intersection becomes one car, the probability that this is the guy buying that product is probably higher than if you just averaged the sales of the product over all the cars that were ever present during that purchase. After all, if this product X is only purchased a few times a year and the only car that was there each time was car Y, the probability that this guy driving car Y just "happens" to be there every time that purchase happens becomes lower too.
I'm no statistician, but it seems like you could calculate the probability of it being a coincidence versus the probability of there being a relationship, and when the probability of there being a relationship is high enough, you could take the leap and make the assumption. Of course, you'll get false positives, probably many of them, but if you crank your thresholds up high enough it may be a net win.
A simpler way to improve your data would be to ferret out whatever public information you can about the owner of a given license plate. I wouldn't be too shocked if there were ways of getting this information in bulk. After all, you could do the same sort of subset thing with credit card purchases. If I see person A, B, and X on day 1 and person X, Y and Z on day 2, and I see cars a, b and x on day 1 and x, y and z on day 2, the same sort of subsetting operation could get you a bunch of single-element sets. You'd still probably have to have lots of days of information, but when you have 24-hour monitoring times thousands of stores nationwide times tens of thousands of customers per day per store, you quickly develop a pool of information you could sift through like this. And once I know your car is the one with plate X, I know it for keeps: you can stop paying with your cards all you want, I only needed so many repeat instances to figure it out.
Ultimately, it would be easy to get freaked out by all this, but let's remember what this information is used for: to send you coupons you'd actually want to use. That's the whole thing. Dial back the paranoia a bit.
I don't have the original article that tipped me off, but here is one from 2008 that talks about the early stages of the program.
http://newsbuster.com/pages/Mar08/03_14_08_target_creates.html
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Hint:
For the vast majority of mailer, the person making money is the person who go the companies to buy in.
The great lie of advertising gets more and more exposed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
its funny you mention that, because your girlfriend might get you to go buy tampons for her, and your recognition of the brand you saw in an ad might make you more comfortable selecting that brand over other brands you've never heard of before, and you might not have the money for a $40,000 car now, but someday you may, and exposure to certain brands (usually the ones you see regularly in television advertising) means you will more likely choose a car from a brand you're familiar with, as if you choose something that isn't heavily advertised, none of your friends will be impressed with it when you roll up to work the next day. market research deliberately extends beyond the obvious because nobody wants to buy something that they think they're being tricked into buying, so the task of advertisers is to trick consumers into buying something without them thinking they're being tricked (so they think they are making their own choice).
if you took away all forms of advertising, people would spend much less, and only on things they needed more. we are manipulated into buying stuff we don't need, and that's why there is such big money in advertising (google etc).
Ultimately, it would be easy to get freaked out by all this, but let's remember what this information is used for: to send you coupons you'd actually want to use. That's the whole thing. Dial back the paranoia a bit.
See, that's the thing. Once they've collected all this data and made all these cross-references there isn't anything preventing the data from being used for other reasons. Kind of like the way drivers licenses and social security numbers were not initially inteded to be a form of identification. Yet once they became widespread it was just soo easy to repurpose them.
Same thing with all of these marketing-driven data collection systems - once they've got a ton of data in them it is pretty much inevitable that someone is going trying and use them for something else. It is just too valuable for people to ignore.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Waaaay back when I first got email (late 90's... I'm young, I know), our family used Juno. When creating a new account, the client gave you the option of going through a 3 minute survey so you could choose your interests and hobbies - the ad-supported client would then display relevant ads based on your survey. I thought this was a decent model for a good balance between privacy and showing me ads that I might actually be interested in.
Obviously you've never had a girlfriend who has sent you to buy tampons. You make damn sure you get EXACTLY what she tells you to... when she needs them is NOT the time to be making mistakes.
Obviously you've never had a girlfriend
This is slashdot. You really could have simply ended your whole post there.
Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?
And if you start getting leads on a divorce attorney in your area, you know you're really fucked now.
Life is not for the lazy.
Hash the credit card number, associate the hash with the customer ID. Every time a card is swiped, see who's hash it matches. Card number isn't stored. Hash is useless if stolen.
Combined with a Loyalty card, it's a great way to see who's married to who, since the card minimally gives you the names of the people who are swiping. Names provide geneder information. Purchase history provides information on age, family status, etc.
...it should also be made illegal....It's blatant co-opting of an individuals own faculties.
I believe your founding fathers would have supported Fox's right to bullshit. You are still the sole guardian of your own mental faculties, you are the only person who can decide what you believe and who you trust. Fortunately bullshit detection is not a genetic trait, it is a skill that can be taught. Self-skepticisim is an essential part of that skill, the simple fact that you recognise you're just as susceptible to bullshit as everyone else already gives you some degree of immunity to it, and it's certainly preferable to yet another war on a ubiquitous social problem that inevitably ends up attacking society rather than the problem.
In other words, read my sig.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Oh, like profiling for a crime? /me goes back to watching Minority Report.
They could look at past criminals and their spending histories, and look at all other people with similar ones and correlate all the other uncaught criminals.