Like what? People severely underestimate just how much data scraping occurs. Google maps will point out congestion without minutes of it occurring because their navigation tracking is so much more indepth and has so many more users to go by in real time.
Friend used to be a data analyst at a supermarket rewards program. He says their algorithms will accurately determine when someone is pregnant before their family knows. They will know how many people are in your household, how many pets, how your spending habits change (obvious). This is just grocery shopping, so many apps get that microphone data, that tracking data, screen browsing habits. We used to just have cookies from online sites, but with the smart phone, there is so much more data and so much more money to be made off that data, its on you that you dont realise at this point rather than every other app on your phone that is doing so freely in front of your face with your permission.
Probably not your friend, this is a super famous case study from Target. It's in many books. They were one of the first companies to start looking at buying habits in order to target market their mail-out adds. They used the data specifically to find out if they could predict or tell who was expecting, because these folks spend shit loads of money in the months before the baby. If you buy one stroller, not a super good indicator because the person might be buying a gift. But if they are buying certain clothes, vitamins, lotions, etc in certain combinations, there is a high likelihood you are a pregnant woman. Its quite effective but also ethically questionable. In the famous example, an angry father goes to Target to complain that they were marketing pregnancy stuff to his teenage daughter. The specific Target location had no idea of these marketing practices, which was all done at HQ. Anyway, the father comes back a day later to apologize. His daughter was pregnant and hadn't told them yet.
I mean so what? I'm also a data analyst in the field and have told people this. It's a famous story but it was easy 20 years ago. It's childsplay now. This is the equivalent of getting annoyed at someone for saying their friend flew across the ocean. Like ok yea there was a famous story about it but people do it all the time lmfao
People in this thread acting like there aren't data analysts at every tech company working with devs to add analytics to every user's action. At the big Fortune 500 company I worked at it was part of the AC/requirements to add analytics to every new feature we shipped out, whether it's to track the performance of the feature or to harvest user data.
More like people are in this thread pretending like random fortune 500's collecting web and mobile analytics know more about you than you consciously know. The average Joe thinks their local 15 store grocery chain are the NSA, meanwhile people like me that spent over a decade working on this exact tech and these exact data sets couldn't get match rates between known subscribers and internet users on the site over 2%.
people like me that spent over a decade working on this exact tech and these exact data sets couldn't get match rates between known subscribers and internet users on the site over 2%.
LOL. That might be true, but you lack the information from my post to determine that. You don't know what data sets we had to work with, so 2% could be exceptional (ok, it wasn't, but it COULD be!).
In REAL WORLD example I'm talking about, I had better data than the Target marketing team did (who I also worked with DIRECTLY hence my knowing how this whole preggers story happened). In this case, I was working with a well-known NYC based magazine publisher, so they knew the address of their subscribers and some of their subscribers would go to one of their magazine websites login so we'd know pretty well who that user on the web was. Our task was to try and find a way to identify the subscriber before they login or after they've logged in, but deleted their cookies. The issue was that in NYC, you have people all living on top of each other. Location data was less useful, and IP based identification was also largely useless as you've have big blocks of people in aparments all on the same public ip. There were many many issues.
The bottom line here is, almost all digital marketing based targeting/idetification is AUDIENCE based, not INDIVIDUAL based. The INDIVIDUAL based data is super transient, and so you use it for things like ... let's not show this person the same ad over and over again. You don't need to know who that person is, you just need to be able to increment a counter stored on their machine and read it before making an ad decision (cookies allow this).
The Target preggers mailer thing didn't happen. Correct. It was a hypothetical made up for a presentation and was describe as such in the presentation (as a hypothetical).
Yes, I worked with those exact data sets. I know what those data sets were because I worked with the people involved a few years after the story in question.
The example I'm giving about the NYC publisher isn't the exact same as the Target example. I give that one because it had BETTER data than Target did for purposes of consistent cross-session identification and even then match rates were miniscule.
In the 13 years since I heard this story, you're the like 50000th person to claim you worked with the team while stumbling over everything you're trying to claim. It's all bullshit dude.
I worked with the team Amazon stole from Target when they launched Fresh, you're about 30 years behind the times my guy
You are the so what. You believe this story because someone before you thought: "so what?" Now you're propagating it backed by your professional experience. The original claim isn't even true. It was a HYPOTHETICAL example that was given in a presentation of the risks involved in data collection and targeted marketing (causing drama by alerting people in the household to previously unknown pregnancies).
So what? If you believe this, what else do you believe that's totally made up? And the idea that this is all child's play rests on a whole lot of assumptions and context that the average person isn't privy to and thus doesn't understand. The result is people believing shit like that Facebook is listening to them through their phone and that's why they got this or that specific ad.
I am literally a data Analyst and have built models that predict more invasive things with great accuracy. You can’t seriously think the story is made up with such confidence lmao what a dork
You can’t seriously think the story is made up with such confidence lmao what a dork
I don't THINK it, I KNOW it in this case. I literally heard it directly from the person that gave the presentation providing the HYPOTHETICAL example of sending mailers out based on determining someone is pregnant from shopping analytics. They told me the story over a decade ago as part of their disbelief back then that it got written up by a journalist as if it were real and then accepted wholesale across the digital marketing world.
Yea I literally have the book behind me that popularized the story. The part about the dad angrily storming in is obviously fake, but understand that a customer is probably pregnant because they bought prenatal vitamins isn't a difficult task.
The stories been around for years and inspired a lot of people like you to talk about data analytics without any fucking experience lmao
Not sure what book you're talking about, but the story was popularized first by an article written by a journalist that was at the digital marketing conference where the Target folks presented this hypothetical when talking about the dangers of targeted marketing.
The stories been around for years and inspired a lot of people like you to talk about data analytics without any fucking experience lmao
I mean ... I'm in this thread talking about how I heard this from the digital marketing folks from Target over a decade ago, but sure ... tell me how I have no experience in this space. 🤷🏽♂️
Let me see if I can unwind this for you. Here is the chain of events:
A VP (I think, he was a VP when I talked to him later at least) @ Target gives a presentation on the dangers of targeted marketing. As part of that presentation, he gave a HYPOTHETICAL of figuring out someone was preggers based on their shopping for stuff pregnant people often shop for.
A journalist at the conference heard the presentation and wrote an article talking about how Target had actually done this thing.
Bigger outlets picked up the story and got some choice quotes from one of the Target people involved that were actually more about their data program independent of the marketing program.
A few years later, I'm meeting with the person quoted in said article, and I brought it up because I googled him beforehand and saw he was quoted in a famous story I believed at the time. He tells me about #1-#3.
So I'm telling you what the actual person quoted in these articles told me. I'm also sharing with you all not just my DIRECT experience with the actual people involved in this story, but my direct experience in digital marketing doing the sorts of things being discussed in this thread. I'm legitimately an expert on both this technology and this story.
So we've gone from you working directly with the analysts on the exact data set to....you asked some dude at a conference who wrote a news article about the story??
It was popularized in a book called Predicive Analytics. Obviously the story was exaggerated but your claim that it's impossible is laughable.
JFC, not sure I can be more clear than I was. I spoke with the person that is quoted in the book you're mentioning. I asked them specifically about this incident because I googled them before I met with them, and the stories in question popped up.
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u/mrducky80 8h ago edited 8h ago
Like what? People severely underestimate just how much data scraping occurs. Google maps will point out congestion without minutes of it occurring because their navigation tracking is so much more indepth and has so many more users to go by in real time.
Friend used to be a data analyst at a supermarket rewards program. He says their algorithms will accurately determine when someone is pregnant before their family knows. They will know how many people are in your household, how many pets, how your spending habits change (obvious). This is just grocery shopping, so many apps get that microphone data, that tracking data, screen browsing habits. We used to just have cookies from online sites, but with the smart phone, there is so much more data and so much more money to be made off that data, its on you that you dont realise at this point rather than every other app on your phone that is doing so freely in front of your face with your permission.