Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lemonberry 502 days ago
"Imagine if calls to the police reporting domestic violence resulted in advertising material from divorce lawyers."

While not nearly as cryptic, Target had to adjust their advertising a few years ago because they were accurately predicting women's pregnancies through their analytics. Women received targeted mailings. In many cases probably not problematic, but there's potential for that data to be horribly misused.

2 comments

There is a lot of doubt as to weather that story is real. The story supposedly happened in 2009 when the online Target store was hosted and run by Amazon. Even now Amazon's (or anyone else's) recommendations are not anywhere close to that despite having a decade more experience building recommendations systems. (Yes, Amazon, I want to buy another TV after ordering one yesterday)

http://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen-pregnan...

IIRC one of these women was a teenager who hadn't told her parents about her pregnancy