You Should Worry About the Data Retailers Collect About You

A man walks into a Minneapolis-area Target, angry about coupons his teenage daughter received for baby clothes and cribs. “Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?” he asks a store manager. Except, his daughter really was pregnant. Target had tuned a marketing-prediction model so tightly that it could successfully tell what was happening inside her body, before even the girl’s family knew.

This story, relayed by Charles Duhigg in The New York Times in 2012, is one of the most famous parables of the internet age, and for good reason—it turns a boring consequence of digital marketing strategy into a whodunit personal-privacy mystery with obvious stakes. It draws people in because it tickles a conspiratorial fear: that thanks to the data we fools share with them, companies can root out our deepest secrets.

But Target didn’t exactly predict that the girl was pregnant, or even really reveal the fact to her father. Sure, the teenager’s secret might have been laid bare, but mostly because she couldn’t deny that Target’s advertising mechanism had made an accurate guess. Target didn’t “predict” anything—the retailer just sent out personalized marketing based on products its algorithms suggested a particular customer might buy. But to consumers unaware that retailers had amassed such a large amount of data about them, it like a prediction, as do so many of the other–style clairvoyants ready to reveal your most sensitive thoughts before you’ve even thought to think them.