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Comment by WirelessGigabit | Hacker News Reader

I know there is the famous Target case where Target sent pregnancy related ads to the living-at-her-parents daughter. That's how the dad found out.

I remember a podcast about this. Maybe Reply All. But I cannot find it anymore.

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It later turned out Target sent some of those ads to all families, blindly—it wasn’t causally related to the daughter’s pregnancy. Whoops.

But this way makes a better story.

Do you have a source for that? I've heard that claim before, and I can completely believe it, but I've never seen any real evidence for either side of the story, just a lot of guesses about how the system might have worked.

https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-t... is the main critical post

I was expecting a concrete evidence on why the story is false instead of speculations arguing that it's unimportant. For me it feels like preaching to the choir, I already feel that AI profiling isn't as powerful as people screamed, and that one story is repeated too often, but I need some real argument to say so.

Even the original NY Times story was I heard from somebody who heard from somebody... Did the reporter talk to the angry dad? Who did they talk to?

Well, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

See:

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

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

and

https://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen-pregna...

I learned about this from the audiobook version of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Maybe that is what you're thinking of?

Thank you so much! I owe you a <insert-drink-of-your-choice>!

How Companies Learn Your Secrets (2012)

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

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