These Companies Know When You're Pregnant - And They're Not Keeping It Secret

In early 2012, the New York Times Magazine put out a cover story about Andrew Pole, a statistician working for Target who was tasked with inventing a way to identify potentially pregnant shoppers, even if those shoppers didn’t want the company to know. The rationale, Pole said, was that moms-to-be are a multi-million dollar market, and Target wanted a way to pepper these moneymakers with promos and coupons before its competitors did the same.

Pole obliged. After crawling through the freight of sale data from statewide shoppers on Target’s public baby registry, he came up with a “pregnancy prediction” score that the company would internally assign to each of its regular customers. If you believe the rumors (not everyone does!), Target’s algos were so accurate that the company sent coupons for cribs to a teenage girl before her own father knew she was due.

In total, Gizmodo identified 32 different brokers across the U.S. selling access to the unique mobile IDs from some 2.9 billion profiles of people pegged as “actively pregnant” or “shopping for maternity products.” Also on the market: data on 478 million customer profiles labeled “interested in pregnancy” or “intending to become pregnant.”

More at https://gizmodo.com/data-brokers-selling-pregnancy-roe-v-wade-abortion-1849148426