Application Case 4.7 (Continued)
Target looked at historical buying data for all the females who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past. They analyzed the data from all directions, and soon enough some useful patterns emerged. For example, lotions and special vitamins were among the products with interesting purchase patterns. Lots of people buy lotion, but what they noticed was that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium, and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-large bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals that they could be getting close to their delivery date. In the end, they were able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed them to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, they could also estimate a woman’s due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy
If you look at this practice from a legal perspective, you would conclude that Target did not use any information that violates customer privacy; rather, they used transactional data that almost every other retail chain is collecting and storing (and perhaps analyzing) about their customers. What was disturbing in this scenario was perhaps the targeted concept: pregnancy. There are certain events or concepts that should be off limits or treated extremely cautiously, such as terminal disease, divorce, and bankruptcy.
1. What do you think about data mining and its implication for privacy? What is the threshold between discovery of knowledge and infringement of privacy?
2. Did Target go too far? Did it do anything illegal? What do you think Target should have done? What do you think Target should do next (quit these types of practices)?