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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

> But this data is all across various profiles that would just be forgotten.

Google/Big Data/Advertisers/NSA/MI6 will never forget though ;)

It’s scary to think faceless corporations may often know more about yourself than you, your family, and even closest friends.

Reminds me of a story of Target sending adverts for baby items to a teenager which accurately predicated she was pregnant before she was even aware [1]

It’s all (unencrypted comms, texts, social media, osint, …) archived in massive data centers just waiting to be analyzed.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2024/08/30/con...?

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Target did not figure out a teen was pregnant before she did. She knew she was pregnant, which led to changes in her purchasing habits. Target detected that and sent her promotions which disclosed her father who had need been informed.

Here is a gift link a NYTimes article with more details: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....

i knew the target story but not the motivation about habit forming behind it. very insightful article. thanks.

> Reminds me of a story of Target sending adverts for baby items to a teenager which accurately predicated she was pregnant before she was even aware

Given that the big advertisers have collectively decided to show me both dick pills and breast surgery and sanitary pads, and lawyers specialising in renouncing a citizenship I never had for tax purposes for people residing in a country I don't live in, and several other equally stupid examples, I now think such examples were as much over-selling as most of the claims Musk has made about FSD.

Only time I've seen an advertisement for something relevant to me, I already had it.

You are likely an outlier. Ad targeting is very good at predicting you IF you fall into a cohort that behaves the same as each other. There's only way to find out the answer to this anyway (export our ad targeting data, share it into an anonymous open source pool, and analyze it)

An outlier, yes.

Enough of an outlier they can't figure out my gender, and get the country I live in wrong while showing me the ad? That's a pretty dramatic failure.

Honestly I think ad targeting is good at just following me around and showing me what I just looked at. It's been a while since I've even clicked on an ad on purpose.

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