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Your Data Footprint Is Affecting Your Life In Ways You Can't Even Imagine (fastcoexist.com)
An anonymous reader cites the following excerpts from a FastCoExist article: Innocently clicking on a link results in ad targeting that's hard to shake and our purchases quickly reveal more information than we intend, such as the infamous example of Target knowing a woman is pregnant before she's told her family -- and before she's purchased any baby products. [...] Predictions about you are deeply shaping your life in ways of which you are probably blissfully unaware. Predictions about you (and millions of other strangers) are starting to deeply shape your life. Your career, your love life, major decisions about your health and well-being, and even if you end up in jail, are now being governed in no small part by the digital bread crumbs you've left behind -- many of which you don't even know you've dropped in the first place.
"And yet....we can't seem to track down and prosecute those scumbags who try to scam old people and other tech novices on the Internet."
In fact, if the feds are unable to track down ransomware scammers, I submit that the whole surveillance problem is a mirage. If surveillance tech had the super-powers everyone imagines they have, that would be both a simple problem, and would be a way of making the public feel better about surveillance.
I thought something similar when I skimmed the headline. I mean, I don't bother using an adblocker, but I also ignore and don't click on banner ads. Then I decided to dig deeper and read the NY Times article in the "Target knowing a woman is pregnant" link. That was a very illuminating article and showed me just how clever companies have gotten about analyzing data and creating marketings strategies around the data.
Companies like Target can now do intelligent marketing targeted towards you even if you block all banner ads. Hell, even if you haven't touched a computer in the last 5 years they can still find a way to market to you. Have you ever bought anything from a Target store? If you used a credit card, they have a way to uniquely identify who you are and what your shopping habits are at their stores. What's more, from other sources of publicly available data and purchase histories they can buy from other companies, they can fill in a lot of gaps and figure out much more about you and what you may be interested in buying than you might think.
To those who have never been to a Target store, whenever you buy your items and check out, you're handed a few coupons along with your receipt. These coupons don't exist until your payment is being printed - they come out of a separate printer whose sole purpose is to print coupons tailored to the person who is buying goods. If you've used their store a few times with the same credit card, you start seeing a lot of coupons either for the items you have already bought in the past or for items in the same general category as items you've bought in the past. And that's even if you've never bought anything from them online or used any of their online offers.
I was especially surprised to read that Target had apparently already considered that people don't like companies like Target knowing too much about them. So, if they do figure out, for example, that a woman is pregnant then they pepper in random coupons for unrelated things along with the baby-related coupons to make it seem like the baby-related coupons were just random chance coupons that anyone could have gotten.
It's a very interesting age of data analysis we're entering into. Potentially dystopian and Orwellian? Sure. Potentially utopian and equalitarian? Sure, that too. As usual, I'll predict it ends up somewhere in-between.
They can tell a lot about you by routine purchases, especially if they look for patterns of change. I've read about the Target case; it isn't just obvious things like buying prenatal vitamins and maternity clothes; a sudden switch in preference for unscented products is common with the hormonal changes pregnant women experience.
The prediction doesn't have to be perfect to be uncannily accurate.
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