Target Knows Your Daughter Is Knocked Up: More Upsides to Zero Privacy

People are willing to sell information about themselves quite cheaply—a couple of bucks off a grocery bill will get them to consistently use a discount card tied to their names, a coupon for in-store Starbucks coffee extracts a usable email address.

The ideas that stores keep tabs on their customers can seem creepy, but reflect for a moment on this interesting tale from this week's New York Times Magazine in mind:

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

"My daughter got this in the mail!" he said. "She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?"

The manager didn't have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man's daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

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."

When people enter new phases of life—graduations, marriages, births—their buying habits are up for grabs. Target uses the mountains of data it collects to identify when those moments are about to occur and get people through their doors and into the habit of shopping at their stores. To do this, they send targeted ads and coupons for precisely the stuff that people in that phase of life want or need to buy.

For now, Target will even accommodate your need not to feel spied on, though I suspect that will diminish over time, much as it has with online advertising.

"We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, 'Here's everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,' " one Target executive told me. "We do that for grocery products all the time." But for pregnant women, Target's goal was selling them baby items they didn't even know they needed yet.

"With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly," the executive said. "Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We'd put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We'd put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance….As long as we don't spook her, it works."

Lots more Reason on the upsides of living in Database Nation.

Via Conor Friedersdorf.