It is not ok for a retail company to profile your underage daughter, find out that she is probably pregnant (before you do!) and then do targeted advertisement. That is wrong and more than a little creepy.
And this has never happened in small towns where merchants know everyone's business and gossip. There's always a backchannel of data when you are out in public.
The pregnant teenager outlier certainly made for an interesting and headline-worthy story. Hopefully future big data projects like this put a bit more thought into the human side of the equation, but never count on it I suppose.
Yeah... But we used to gossip about regulars and what they were buying (and why) all the time when I worked retail. We weren't as efficient as an algorithm of course, but we did use that knowledge (hunch) to recommend things as well. It's just weirder when a computer does it, rather than a person -- which is fair enough, and kinda interesting to think about!
The pregnant teenager outlier certainly made for an interesting and headline-worthy story. Hopefully future big data projects like this put a bit more thought into the human side of the equation, but never count on it I suppose.