tl;dr she didn’t send any obvious signals that she was pregnant, and didn’t get any ads. The headline only represents about four paragraphs from a very long article that rambles all over the place.
Then eventually she dropped the experiment, proving just how easy it is for one slip-up to tip them off:
> My modest experiment went surprisingly smoothly. Because I’d had my first child not long before, this time I didn’t need to buy anything, and I didn’t want to learn anything. I smooth-brained my way to three months, four months, five; no diaper ads. I called up a lawyer and data-privacy specialist named Dominique Shelton Leipzig to get her perspective. Globally, she told me, we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes—that’s eighteen zeroes—of data per day. “The short answer is, you probably haven’t hidden what you think you have,” she said. I told her about the rules I’d set for myself, that I didn’t have many apps and had bought nothing but prenatal vitamins, and that Instagram did not appear to have identified me as pregnant. She paused. “I’m amazed,” she told me. “If you didn’t see any ads, I think you might have succeeded.” I congratulated myself by instantly dropping the experiment and buying maternity pants; ads for baby carriers popped up on my Instagram within minutes.
I reckon privacy is a lost cause except for diehards like me. For by far the vast majority of people find the so-called freeware offered by Google et al just too convenient to resist.
For Google et al the tiny minority of us who've achieved some degree of privacy aren't worth worrying about, and we as a group aren't going to grow any larger for reasons that achieving a reasonable degree of privacy is a far too onerous a job for the majority of people, moreover most would consider their phones broken after such privacy modding.
For instance, the phone I'm typing on now hasn't yet been rooted but that largely doesn't matter, it's reasonably private (but not completely so) with the following tweaks: first, it has no Google account (probably the most important tweak of all), all apps except for a few F-droid ones have internet access disabled (their calls to the internet are diverted to a VPN nul location by a firewall), all Google apps are disabled including Google Play Services and especially Chrome, no non-F-droid app has access to background data, and as a precaution the disabled Google apps have all permissions denied/turned off, in effect they have access to nothing, neither the internet nor hardware. These tweaks send both the Play Services and the apps that rely on it into spasms and they keep bleeting notifications to turn Play Services back on or the apps won't work, this bleeting is most annoying but it too is easily remedied by disabling notifications from the offending apos. Finally, my F-droid browsers have JavaScript disabled (there's more but that'll do for now).
Wirh these tweaks the phone still works fine for me, calls and messaging all work OK, so too do GPS, WiFi, the internet along all phone sensors and my non-Gmail (POP) email account.
That's about the minimum one needs to do to achieve even a modicum of privacy on one's phone. That said, a phone so tweaked is essentially useless to the vast majority who expect Google, Facebook and similar apps to work (if you want privacy you just can't use them). That the vast majority cannot do without these Big Tech apps is why I believe privacy is essentially dead.
Incidentally, some may be interested to know that many (but not all) apps that complain about not working if Play Services are turned off actually do still work. What Google and developers don't tell you is that these apps use the Play Services to report your activities to Google and the world, it's a key reason why I nuke Play Services.
Usually microG makes the GMS complainers work while still voiding all the data they try to report.
IMHO unrooted android is starting to become actually viable, for example there are apps (like AdGuard) that use a VPN to MitM all your connections and filter out ads even if they attempt to hide inside HTTPS connections.
And with the `pm disable-user` trick you can disable apps that you can't normally uninstall (or disable). Which is great for OEM- or carrier-installed bloatware.
Also worth noting: it was her second child so she “didn’t need to buy anything or search for information”. And the experiment was terminated (it appears - it’s a bit unclear) after 5 months.
Another interesting factoid mentioned:
> identifying a single pregnant woman is as valuable to data brokers as knowing the age, gender, and location of more than two hundred non-pregnant people, because of how much stuff new parents tend to buy
I don't remember the exact list, but it was 4-6 life events that are each potentially worth $100+ per person to marketers, and I think that was in ~1996 dollars.
Iirc:
College graduation/ first real job, Wedding, first home purchase, first kid on the way, retirement filed-for, and ??? I'm forgetting something. Maybe out-of-town move?
Related and overlapping: I suggest searching for the late 90s article on Target basically telling a teen that she was pregnant via direct mailers before she even knew. Dad over reacts then has to eat his accusation when they (Target) were right.
Based on non-typical purchase of un-scented lotion and 2-3 other undisclosed items.
Idk how old you are, but part of the point is the 'before times' ended much earlier than most are aware.
The biggest lesson of the Target story (for the marketers) was don't let consumers know that the marketer knows so much about them.
Had they just sent diaper coupons mixed with generic ads, they might have been more successful. 'Congratulations You're Pregnant!' is what didn't work.
This is very typical of New Yorker pieces - I enjoyed the broader context of capital surveillance. We can’t editorialise titles here, so this is bound to happen.
> My modest experiment went surprisingly smoothly. Because I’d had my first child not long before, this time I didn’t need to buy anything, and I didn’t want to learn anything. I smooth-brained my way to three months, four months, five; no diaper ads. I called up a lawyer and data-privacy specialist named Dominique Shelton Leipzig to get her perspective. Globally, she told me, we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes—that’s eighteen zeroes—of data per day. “The short answer is, you probably haven’t hidden what you think you have,” she said. I told her about the rules I’d set for myself, that I didn’t have many apps and had bought nothing but prenatal vitamins, and that Instagram did not appear to have identified me as pregnant. She paused. “I’m amazed,” she told me. “If you didn’t see any ads, I think you might have succeeded.” I congratulated myself by instantly dropping the experiment and buying maternity pants; ads for baby carriers popped up on my Instagram within minutes.