Big Brother is watching:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/....

You know those "bonus cards" or loyalty cards the supermarkets and other stores use which collect all sorts of purchase info. Well, this is an example of what they can do with that information, predict when women customers are pregnant and send them targeted advertising.

At any rate, a father comes in a local Target store upset that they're sending his teenaged daughter ads for pregnancy and baby related stuff. What are you trying to do, encourage her to get pregnant, he fumes. Well, turns out she was indeed pregant, which he soon learns.

We are creating the infrastructure for the most Orwellian, totalitarian society the world has ever seen, and created it willingly. All for the purpose of selling more and more crap. All that is needed is to hand over the keys to the tyrant once this Skynet is created. Would a single Jew be alive today if Hitler had this technology? And could a Hitler be defeated?

Congrats on invoking Godwin's law in the first post. But a good point, nonetheless.

Godwin's Law is one of the most misunderstood principles. It is about *spurious* comparisons to Hitler/Nazis, not valid comparisons. It is when poster A makes a point and then poster B, who disagress, compares poster A to Hitler for holding such an opinion. Godwin's point was about the nature of Internet discussions where any conversation is likely to degenerate into such nonsense.

Target did nothing wrong. The young lady doesn't understand birth control apparently.

Publius: Considering the data they collected and the way they collected it, along with the major league help from IBM, they had a considerably better system.

She must have purchased her prenatal vitamins at the pharmacy.

Publius,

Yes, we could defeeat Hitler, because we'd have all Hitler's info

Azusgm - I think accessing that info, with her name, would violate HIPAA.

They probably accessed that she quit buying monthly female supplies, and drew the conclusion as to why she didn't need them any more.

Flick - Very likely you are correct.

Heard this interview on digital tracking last night. Pretty good.

http://redriverradio.org/post/how-compan....

I figured out that somehow facebook is accessing your contacts list on the email account you list with them.

Or bought a home pregnancy test ...

When you sign up with Facebook, and use the "Find a Friend" through your email service, it definitely copies everyone's email address. Even if you don't do it, if someone else has you as an email contact, you'll get friend recommendations for them.

That's how FB was always recommending my ex-landlord, and some friends who constantly CC'd those change letters around. I'd get friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend recommendations simply because I was in their "once-emailed" list.

Not exactly what I would consider particularly insidious. Just something that is made TERRIBLY easy by computers...

It's a long article, but well worth the read.

The author acknowledges that Target didn't violate HIPAA - or any other law - in collecting data on its customers. It hired the analyst to make some predictions, and was thrilled when he announced they had a way to predict which customers were about to have a baby. The analyst had to convince Target that it would be a *BAD IDEA* to openly use this information, for the very reason pointed out in the title of this thread. In the end, Target wound up sending expectant mothers targeted coupons in their flyers - but also included coupons for items they would never purchase, like leaf blowers or beer coolers.

It turns out, we like having access to the targeted savings, but we don't want Target to know anything about our private lives. Guess what? If you use a credit card while shopping at Target, or Wal-Mart, or Home Depot, they already know an awful lot about you. That horse is out of the barn.

Target just screwed up here because they showed their cards to early. They won't make that mistake again.

Quote:

If you use a credit card while shopping at Target, or Wal-Mart, or Home Depot, they already know an awful lot about you

They do...but whatever you do...if Target asks for your id (assuming you're stupid enough to shop there), handing it over to them will give them much more...especially since they won't tell you they're about to scan everything into their system...now they have your fingerprints, digital photo, facial recognition data, SS number, and other useful info depending on which state you're in.

Target is a piece of **** that deserves to crash and burn.

Yep, this is "predictive analytics" they call it, which is the use of statistical methods to make predictions based on consumption patterns.Purchases of certain things correlate with certain other conditions or states. In the article it turned out the pregnant women make larger purchases of unscented lotions and other things, and they can say, as the article mentions, that a customer with such and such a purchase pattern has an 87% probability of being pregnant and due by a certain date.

While the purpose for creating this system is just to sell you more and more crap, and making that selling more efficient, thus maximizing profit, it is easy to see what a tool for totalitarian control it would be in the wrong hands.

Purchases of this basket of products correlate strongly with being a dissident of the regime, etc, etc, etc.

Frankly, I'm much more worried about what Google knows about me than Target.

Target knows what I do. Google knows what I'm thinking about. There will come a seminal event in the near future when the world suddenly realizes that "Do No Evil" is an impossible goal when you're in possession of exponentially increasing amounts of information and the predictive analytics it enables.

Quote:

Here's what Google knows about you, what it stores right there on its servers, waiting for a hacker: Google has every e-mail you ever sent or received on Gmail. It has every search you ever made, the contents of every chat you ever had over Google Talk. It holds a record of every telephone conversation you had using Google Voice, it knows every Google Alert you've set up. It has your Google Calendar with all content going back as far as you've used it, including everything you've done every day since then. It knows your contact list with all the information you may have included about yourself and the people you know. It has your Picasa pictures, your news page configuration, indicating what topics you're most interested in. And so on.

Quote:

Google, like Facebook, owns trillions if not quadrillions-plus bits of information. They mine it, use it to sell ads, algorithm it. But my real fear is not Google. My real fear is that computer technology has turned into an arms race between good guys and bad guys. Google may see itself as a jaunty white hat wearer, valiantly protecting all our information. And it may be doing it to the best of its ability. But hackers are hard at work all the time.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/09/opinion/gh....

Do you know how hard it is to get people to use PGP/GPG encryption on email?

And the sad thing is, this is nothing new. Data mining companies have been doing this for decades. I remember seeing a show on PBS (NOVA maybe?) back in the 80's about how advertising works. In the show, a female Judge had a similar experience as the Target teenage girl. Only the Judge, her husband and her doctor knew she was pregnant, yet she started getting pregnancy related advertising (even sample diapers) in the mail. Needless to say she was not a happy camper about this breach of her privacy, and started looking into it.
Turns out that the "predictive analytics" data (see Publius' post above) mined from her grocery store rewards/loyalty card guessed that she was pregnant. She was then added to the company's "is pregnant" mailing list, and that list was sold to other advertisers looking for "is pregnant" customers.

They also stated on the show that "predictive analytics" revealed that people who like Ragu spaghetti sauce tend to be dog owners, and that people who like Prego spaghetti sauce tend to be cat owners. They weren't sure why, but that's what the data showed.

Ragu tastes like cheap institutional food. Prego tastes like more expensive institutional food.

Between the two, I'll take prego. And a dog.

Why should this surprise anyone? When you signed up for one of those "track me" cards, what did you expect the store to do with it?

You mean you used your real name and addy when you signed up for your "discount" card. Soon the phrase "cash is king" is going to find a whole new level of respect for the anonymity it can bring.

Oh and some stores are "sharing" their data between themselves, and in the case of Kroger and Speedway/SuperAmerica they are working off of a shared data base. Yes your Kroger card works at Speedway/SuperAmerica and vice verse.

This isn't about discount cards - not at Target anyway. Use any form of plastic linked to your real name for payment, and they've got you.

A related reason not to shop at Target. I got coupons sent to my name and address... enjoy these discounts and know how it feels to be a REDcard member, blah blah blah. No way to opt-out listed, so I called the customer service number from target.com. No way to choose to speak to a human being, irrelevant menu options repeat twice and then it transfers me to a nice-enough sounding lady. The only way I can think of that Target got my name and address was an alcohol purchase I made for a party. Yeah, I forgot about this thread and gave them my license. She said the driver's license scan was for age only. I think that's a lie. So at the end of opting me out of the mailing list, which she said would take two months, she asks for my e-mail address. I told her, no, this is not an opportunity for the company to get even more information about me, and I asked to speak to a supervisor about the e-mail question. She said it was policy to ask, I said I understood that, and she (maybe pretended to or) attempted twice to connect to a supervisor and told me she was unable to do so. I told her I would just post online about it and Target would lose business. So... don't shop at Target. Evil mother****ers, Target.