Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
I'm the father of the house, and I came to the conclusion that I don't want to know what's going on in the house. Both kids are in their late teens now, and mutual ignorance seems to be the best way to get along.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Coincidentally, the FBI now lists as suspicious activity making purchases with cash.
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?
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.)
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
With a son, you only have to worry about one dick. With a daughter, you have to worry about all the dicks.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.