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Comment by DavidPeiffer | Hacker News Reader

Man, seeing that in 2014 and knowing things have escalated orders of magnitude since then is frustrating.

I went to Target to buy stuff for a friend after they gave birth a few years ago. I made sure I paid in cash, but I imagine they still tried tying it back to me via license plate recognition.

Also relevant - Target sending targeted ads to a teenager whose dad didn't know she was pregnant yet. Such an annoying but prevalent part of life that's only really avoidable by shopping at local places, always paying cash, and never joining any loyalty programs even if they have nice benefits.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

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> Target sending targeted ads to a teenager whose dad didn't know she was pregnant yet.

That's how I found out you can't hide a speeding ticket from your parents when you live with them. They see the plethora of legal ads when they check the mail.

Whoa, retail is doing LPR now? Not surprising, but goodness.

I forgot a high-value item at a checkout lane the other day, and when I returned with my receipt to ask for it, they pulled up the video of the checkout lane to confirm I hadn't gotten it. Not terribly far-fetched to see that moving to identification via tracking to LPR or otherwise.

And sure enough, google finds a vendor that combines the two: https://www.asmag.com/showpost/9640.aspx

Local shop keeper may well know your dad too.

At least the local shopkeeper doesn't keep a comprehensive database on people, do deep mining, and share your data with others, though.

Well, that used to be the case, anyway. These days, with so many small businesspeople using third party data services, you can't even count on that much anymore

Claims it is a myth : https://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen-pregna...

If it is not a myth, wouldn't there be countless other reports?

I mean that sounds similar to exactly what people have been saying for the whole decade, that their devices and services are advertising things to them that they only briefly thought about or mentioned in passing to a friend.

You don't see the similarity? Or were you hoping specifically for someone being advertised pregnancy and baby products, because you probably won't find stories of specifics.

So the fact there are similar stories, but just not the kind of stories I describe ( pregnancy, somebody else finding out ), make you conclude it must be obvious ?

I don't get the logic.

I didn't say "obvious" and asked if you see the similarity.

Do you or don't you, why or why not? That's the discussion.

I do see a bit of similarity, however the Target case includes presenting these ads to someone else, a component your anecdata misses.

But I don't see the logic. If you are not claiming it must be true, what are you claiming?

That it sounds similar to what's happened the rest of the decade. I didn't make a conclusion aside from that observation and there is no claim, I know "who does that online anymore we're supposed to masquerade every response as an unwavering confrontation", I contributed because its a conversation, crazy right

Hmm interesting. That does make sense to me.

I always suspected that if this story was true it wasn't predicted so much as scraped from a public declaration or something; or predicted with a huge error bar because the cost of targeting someone who isn't pregnant is pretty low.

Maybe it's a myth, but if so, it's an influential myth. I first heard this story about 10 years ago when I was new to the business and working on ad tech. It was used as an example of "what not to do" (because creeping out customers is bad for business.) The ideal, I was told, was to toe the line as close as possible. Creep on customers, but don't let them realize it. Hide highly targeted suggestions among less accurate suggestions, to disguise the efficacy of the tracking.

The story was that this predated (and indeed was one of the inspirations for) the marketing camouflage discussed in the article. That is, they learned that people thought it was creepy to be congratulated on a new baby they were keeping secret by a store, so they stopped the congratulations part and hid the baby ads among the others. Exactly what would prevent those claims in the future.

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