This has been true for decades.
I recall my university classes in mid 2000s talking about examples of machine learning models for grocery store purchase patterns.
I recall my university classes in mid 2000s talking about examples of machine learning models for grocery store purchase patterns.
I wish we had an update on what the situation looks like today.
¹https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-mark-zuckerberg-thinks-yo...
So far, in situations where it wouldn't be rude to ask, I've been able to determine with pretty good accuracy that at least someone in the household has the advertised health concerns.
You can also get an idea of their financial situation, given what buckets advertisers put them in and what they're advertised, as well.
Similarly, advertisers know when you're at friend's location, or elsewhere, and may show ads tailored to your profile.
A month's supply of Wegovy/etc costs nearly $2k.
Same thing with the monoclonal antibody drugs, you can be looking at tens of thousands of dollars per month for a single patient.
You also see this with luxury brands, that advertise to segments that cannot afford their products, in order to build image of luxury and prestige.
That said, I asked my friends/family if they had <not embarrassing or too intrusive> condition, and more often than not, someone in the household had it.
I only later realized that he's not using an adblocker, so this might actually be tailored to his profile.
I often forget how different my online experience is because I use Brave
"before her family knew" is a pretty low bar to clear, especially if the daughter was actively trying to hide the pregnancy (eg. by wearing baggy clothing). Moreover if we're taking the example of this specific story, where the women presumably knew she was pregnant (as opposed to the more sensational story of "Target figured out a women was pregnant before she even knew!!1!" that also makes the rounds), it's not hard to imagine how Target might be in a better position to infer her pregnancy without being galaxy brained or creepy. Take the examples given in the article:
>Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug.
To analyze it to infer personal information? Starting to be creepy, even in the cases where tracking it isn’t.
And then use the inferred information for marketing explicitly and overtly around the inference? Definitely getting creepier.
Oh no, a woman bought lotion, a purse, and a rug. Must be pregnant!
>On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
That quote, especially the "there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of" part makes me think she knew and was trying to hide it. There's also the expectation that if she really didn't know, that person writing the article would put that detail in, given how extra sensational it would make the story.
My wife and I spent 3 years in fertility treatments, which involves a lot of online activity similar to that of someone newly pregnant (buying pregnancy tests, researching symptoms, etc).
We were constantly bombarded with pregnancy related advertising, it really ramped up after the first year. Tons of "congratulations" cards, coupon books, "new mom" magazines, up to and including unsolicited shipments of formula and branded blankets.
So to answer your question, it's still happening, and it's disgusting. I strongly suspect Carrot Fertility sold our information because the peak of it all happened a couple months after I gained access to them through my employer.
(We did eventually succeed, our baby is nearing 6 months)
But the really-good hits are probably tough to notice. They won't stand out as "boy this is a stupid ad" and even if I just scroll past a well-targeted ad, it's probably doing its job of making that company/product a bit closer to the top of mind...
> This story doesn’t even show that Target tried to figure out whether the girl was pregnant. It just shows that she received a flyer that contained some maternity items and her weird dad freaked out and wanted to talk to the manager. There’s no way to know whether the flyer arrived as a result of some complex targeting algorithm that correctly deduced that the girl was pregnant because she bought a bunch of lotion, or whether they just happened to be having a sale on diapers that week and sent a flyer about it to all their customers.
https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-t...
There are surely large numbers of dumb cases of being mispredicted out there in.
And I think it's fair to to throw flak in AI's direction, if what it does is make capitalism less tolerable by removing some of the "inefficiencies."
While apologists for capitalism have done a good job of pushing me towards wanting to burn it all down, I doubt that's in the cards any time soon and limits on AI technology are far more likely.
We aren’t getting regulations on AI. The military industrial complex includes the tech industry now. It’s an existential race to beat China.
The sad reality is that for all of our potential futures, we aren’t getting the Star Trek post scarcity utopia. Our onboard ship computers aren’t generating Earl Grey, hot, they are generating trillionaires on one hand and poverty on the other.
Too bad nobody really even knows what this means but a lot of people will use it as a slogan to convince people to give this money!