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Fantastic article about advanced retail analysis.

tl;dr:

Target employs statistics against your purchase history to find out if you're pregnant. Why, specifically, pregnancy? People are more apt to change their buying habits during major life changes, including pregnancy. The article gives some examples of purchase history that suggests not only whether someone is expecting, but when they are likely to be due.

So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores. Duhigg shares an anecdote — so good that it sounds made up — that conveys how eerily accurate the targeting is. An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:

“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.​

(Nice customer service, Target.)

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.”​

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They now mix random items into the targeted ads - such as lawnmowers next to cribs - so that customers think they are getting the same generic ads that their neighbors are getting. It's not as creepy as long as people don't think of it as creepy...

There's a short summary of the article at forbes:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmir...teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

And the 10 page article at NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html

(Or as a single long page: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=all )

Well... yeah. This is why they give you those store cards to get small discounts on things: They are data mining your purchases to get a better idea of what is selling and what isn't. They compensate you for this by giving you the discounts and coupons. I'm not at all surprised they'd use it to determine what you'd want to buy in the future.

Well, yeah. This was on a smaller scale, but it is exactly what Google wants to do starting March 1st.

--Patrick

Google's been doing this for years already. What this does is combine the information from all their properties for it.

Which is something people (rightly) worried about when they bought doubleclick.

Now advertisers can ask google to send ads to people who have visited a pregnancy related website in the last 2 months.

Now Google will be able to get your approximate geographic location based on your IP, combine it with your web searches and the unique identifier of your mobile device (or the MAC address of your computer) to build a profile of where you live and work, when you travel between the two, what your interests are (both public and private), who you interact with, and possibly why you do so. This will enable them to more accurately guess your wants/needs when serving up ads/search results/services.

It might also help them to get more and more Google-friendly legislation passed if they suggest that perhaps some of this data history of, say, a Senator or Mayor might leak out to the public through various means and wouldn't that be unfortunate.

[EDIT] Furthermore, your Web browser also helpfully and automatically passes along the page you came from before you clicked onto Google and also reports which page you head off to next. This tends to make me a bit uncomfortable.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

[EDIT] Furthermore, your Web browser also helpfully and automatically passes along the page you came from before you clicked onto Google and also reports which page you head off to next. This tends to make me a bit uncomfortable.

Click to expand...

I guess that's so people can't just log out of whatever Google thing they're on to avoid it.

PatrThom said:

Well, yeah. This was on a smaller scale, but it is exactly what Google wants to do starting March 1st.

--Patrick

Click to expand...

Don't worry they'll just apologize for it later. That counts right?

Yeah, Google freaks me out a lot more than what Target is doing (which I think is brilliantly-executed, IMO). Target wants to build a profile of what my needs are based on things I choose to buy at their store? Cool, saves me time, saves me money (not in the aggregate, really, but per purchase, at least).

Google wants to do the same thing based on every website I visit whether I use Google to find them or not regardless of what I use them for? Yeeeeaaaah, not so cool about that.