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Comment by MaastrichtTreat | Hacker News Reader

> If the father of a girl travelling to Syria to join Isil had no idea what she was planning, what hope does her computer have?

Algorithms can tell if you're pregnant before you know it. Wasn't that Target incident also about a father having no idea his daughter was pregnant until the machine learning algorithms indirectly informed him? I can't really trust the article's conclusions if it contradicts these well known events.

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Forgive my ignorance, but what was that Target incident, and how/why algorithms informed a father that his daughter is pregnant?

I believe they're referring to [0], where Target's use of buying patterns on a loyalty card led them to send out pregnancy related vouchers to the daughter.

[0] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

This conclusion seems very, very misguided. Literally anyone around can know better what a girl that age is planning than her father. I think the whole article understimates very much the amount of useful information that can computers can infer. Reliable models take time to develop, so intelligence agencies are overwhelmed with false positives, but I'm increasingly confident they will get there. Target is a good POC - though it operated on a much smaller and simpler data sets, it also demonstrated how much interesting knowledge can you get out of the data.

The conclusion is classic Telegraph- where conservative values trump research or real life. A lot of their content is written to keep their readers happy- "I know my kids".

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