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Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
A year or so ago, there were some articles about Target's (US primary competitor to Wal-Mart) data-mining was detecting information about costumers. The lead off in one story was how this family was upset because they started getting pregnancy targeted ads from Target before the parents found out their teen-aged daughter was pregnant. There may be a lot of chaff, but sometimes examining the "chaff" gives unexpected (and unexpectedly accurate) results.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirh...er-father-did/
From Forbes:
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“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”
Bold is mine. That’s a quote for our times.
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So Target got sneakier about sending the coupons. The company can create personalized booklets; instead of sending people with high pregnancy scores books o’ coupons solely for diapers, rattles, strollers, and the “Go the F*** to Sleep” book, they more subtly spread them about:
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“Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”
via How Companies Learn Your Secrets – NYTimes.com.
So the Target philosophy towards expecting parents is similar to the first date philosophy? Even if you’ve fully stalked the person on Facebook and Google beforehand, pretend like you know less than you do so as not to creep the person out.
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First date Philosophy. Heh.
Seems *everybody* is doing it to everybody in the virtual village.
Here, the NYT original:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/ma...anted=all&_r=0
In the olden days, when we lived in villages and were lucky to hit 40, everybody knew everybody's business. When people speak of the internet as a global village it is no metaphor.
(Privacy via anonymity is a recent invention dating back to the mega-cities of the 20th.)