Woman registers period late on app, is starts seeing baby related ads | Hacker News Reader

Woman registers period late on app, is starts seeing baby related ads

twitter.com

35 pointsjacquesm13 comments

Reminds me of a story maybe ten years ago where a daughter had her pregnancy outed to her parents due to all the "you're pregnant!" spam being sent to everyone in the house all of a sudden.

Wasn't that caused by Target physical mail spam? At least that's what I remember.

Yes, I remember reading this in the book about building habits(?) I believe.

This was, I think, in 1996. (Edit: Nope, ~2002.)

And depending on if you believe the daughter or not, Target knew that she was pregnant before she did. It was able to tie the purchase of unscented lotion (and a few other items, but nothing as obvious as a pregnancy test, or anything similar) to her home address from using her parents credit card.

The lesson Target learned was not to show their hand.

But it goes to show how much effort is put into finding new (almost) parents to market to.

Edit 2:

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....

Doesn't Facebook allow you to see why an ad targets you?

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/07/understand-why-youre-se...

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/01/facebook-new-tool-explains-w...

Moms-to-be leads are the most expensive consumer leads.

That's a big privacy issue if you start doing IP address based targeting on a residential address....

This looks like confirmation bias to me.

Surveillance app is to personal data as woodchipper is to arm.

It's a gross failure of professional ethics to allow these attractive nuisances to exist and trip people up.

Was the app's name mentioned?

No, she's a reporter, and wasn't confident enough to out the app without proof.

I am not convinced that an app like that would share potential pregnancy data with ad networks, if there’s even such a channel to begin with. It would be good to have the app’s name, and investigate if this is reproducible.

Without that we’re just looking at very complex ad networks/algorithms and trying to reason about them without seeing thousands of signals they might be seeing. For example, age and other interests based on browsing history would’ve triggered this, too.

1) she claims the ads abruptly stopped as soon as she corrected/updated the app to show she wasn't late.

2) There is huge demand for finding out about a consumers pregnancy.

It's one of the "big events" that marketers sometimes pay $10s-$100s for a jump on competitors, along with weddings, buying a house, & going to college.

It's one of the few windows in a person's life where they 1) are about to spend a bunch of money on products they have no/little prior opinion on, and 2) are willing to substantially change previous habitual behaviors, including where to shop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com