Perilous

When a Minnesota-area man received coupons for baby products from the Target Corporation addressed to his teenage daughter, he was outraged. My daughter is in high school, he complained to a Target store manager. Why are you sending her this stuff? Turns out she was, in fact, pregnant, but he hadn’t been told about it.

What the daughter presumably did not know was that Target collects extraordinarily detailed personal information about its customers for marketing purposes. Using its “pregnancy-prediction model” created by a statistics and economics expert named Andrew Pole, Target creepily can aim products at women during various phases of their pregnancies.

It all started when Pole was asked by the company’s marketing department in 2002: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?” The company creates unique IDs for its customers and then links those IDs to all kinds of other personal data, like marital status, estimated salary and credit cards used. Read more from the New York Times story that Target executives were apparently not thrilled about:

When I offered to fly to Target’s headquarters to discuss its concerns, a spokeswoman emailed that no one would meet me. When I flew out anyway, I was told I was on a list of prohibited visitors. ‘I’ve been instructed not to give you access and to ask you to leave,’ said a very nice security guard named Alex. Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Target realized soon after Pole perfected his model, could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they were spying on them?

Image: Flickr/Sarah Gilbert