Issue of the week: When companies know you too well

Your shopping habits are giving away your secrets, said Charles Duhigg in The New York Times Magazine. Companies are getting shockingly good at collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data about you so they can sell you more stuff. They know about not only your every purchase but also “your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving, and the number of cars you own.” Retailer Target’s data mining has become so sophisticated that it can predict that a woman is pregnant based on her purchases of products like cotton balls and unscented lotion. It’s time we all were more aware of how companies can crunch data to unlock the most intimate details of our lives.

Who cares? said Felix Salmon in Reuters.com. “We’ve always lived in a world of personalization and targeting,” whether it’s the maitre d’ who knows your name or the ads in your local newspaper. It’s silly to think we can return to some mythical age when companies knew nothing about us. Nor would I want to. “It’s good for consumers” to get personalized pitches for products and services. It saves time, effort, and money. Sure, “if you’re pessimistically inclined,” you see negative implications down the road, but companies like Target “have no interest in becoming some kind of Hollywood corporate villain.”

I’m not worried about companies that want to send me coupons, said Kevin Drum in MotherJones.com. But if Target can predict pregnancy, what might more nefarious actors tease out? Identifying, say, the early stages of Alzheimer’s would create easy prey for “a semi-shady company hawking dubious life-insurance schemes.” Data mining has gotten a lot cheaper and easier to pull off, and the information being compiled about us is “accessible to just about anyone” for a price. That could turn what is now a nuisance into something potentially cancerous.

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Unless you go survivalist, there’s really no getting off corporate America’s radar, said Keith Wagstaff in Time.com. But most Americans don’t care about being tracked. “The thought of their data floating around in a market that they’ll never see is just too abstract.” Tell that to the father who stormed into a Target outraged that his teenage daughter had received coupons for maternity clothes and cribs, said Duhigg in The New York Times Magazine. When he returned home, he found out that Target had known she was pregnant before he did. “Just wait,” a Target executive says. Soon “we’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.”