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.

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.

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.

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.