[HN Gopher] The Hidden-Pregnancy Experiment: Could I Hide My Pre...
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The Hidden-Pregnancy Experiment: Could I Hide My Pregnancy from My
Phone?
Author : fortran77
Score : 60 points
Date : 2024-05-04 13:28 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| mikpanko wrote:
| https://archive.ph/cdyCT
| tnmom wrote:
| tl;dr she didn't send any obvious signals that she was pregnant,
| and didn't get any ads. The headline only represents about four
| paragraphs from a very long article that rambles all over the
| place.
| jacooper wrote:
| Thanks for saving me the time, I was wondering if she will go
| into more detail, but the more I read the it went sideways.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Then eventually she dropped the experiment, proving just how
| easy it is for one slip-up to tip them off:
|
| > My modest experiment went surprisingly smoothly. Because I'd
| had my first child not long before, this time I didn't need to
| buy anything, and I didn't want to learn anything. I smooth-
| brained my way to three months, four months, five; no diaper
| ads. I called up a lawyer and data-privacy specialist named
| Dominique Shelton Leipzig to get her perspective. Globally, she
| told me, we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes--that's eighteen
| zeroes--of data per day. "The short answer is, you probably
| haven't hidden what you think you have," she said. I told her
| about the rules I'd set for myself, that I didn't have many
| apps and had bought nothing but prenatal vitamins, and that
| Instagram did not appear to have identified me as pregnant. She
| paused. "I'm amazed," she told me. "If you didn't see any ads,
| I think you might have succeeded." I congratulated myself by
| instantly dropping the experiment and buying maternity pants;
| ads for baby carriers popped up on my Instagram within minutes.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Also worth noting: it was her second child so she "didn't need
| to buy anything or search for information". And the experiment
| was terminated (it appears - it's a bit unclear) after 5
| months.
|
| Another interesting factoid mentioned:
|
| > identifying a single pregnant woman is as valuable to data
| brokers as knowing the age, gender, and location of more than
| two hundred non-pregnant people, because of how much stuff new
| parents tend to buy
| beerandt wrote:
| I don't remember the exact list, but it was 4-6 life events
| that are each potentially worth $100+ per person to
| marketers, and I think that was in ~1996 dollars.
|
| Iirc:
|
| College graduation/ first real job, Wedding, first home
| purchase, first kid on the way, retirement filed-for, and ???
| I'm forgetting something. Maybe out-of-town move?
|
| Related and overlapping: I suggest searching for the late 90s
| article on Target basically telling a teen that she was
| pregnant via direct mailers before she even knew. Dad over
| reacts then has to eat his accusation when they (Target) were
| right.
|
| Based on non-typical purchase of un-scented lotion and 2-3
| other undisclosed items.
|
| I'm sure it's only gotten worse since then.
| irrational wrote:
| Wow, other than retirement, I'm glad I passed all those
| milestones in the before times.
| throwup238 wrote:
| That's the most valuable one! The Soylent Green and
| reverse mortgage people pay very well for deal flow.
| platelminto wrote:
| This is very typical of New Yorker pieces - I enjoyed the
| broader context of capital surveillance. We can't editorialise
| titles here, so this is bound to happen.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| I know there is the famous Target case where Target sent
| pregnancy related ads to the living-at-her-parents daughter.
| That's how the dad found out.
|
| I remember a podcast about this. Maybe Reply All. But I cannot
| find it anymore.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| How Companies Learn Your Secrets (2012)
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....
| pweezy wrote:
| I learned about this from the audiobook version of The Power of
| Habit by Charles Duhigg. Maybe that is what you're thinking of?
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Thank you so much! I owe you a <insert-drink-of-your-choice>!
| brians wrote:
| It later turned out Target sent some of those ads to all
| families, blindly--it wasn't causally related to the daughter's
| pregnancy. Whoops.
|
| But this way makes a better story.
| MrJohz wrote:
| Do you have a source for that? I've heard that claim before,
| and I can completely believe it, but I've never seen any real
| evidence for either side of the story, just a lot of guesses
| about how the system might have worked.
| mavhc wrote:
| https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-
| a-t... is the main critical post
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >Surveillance encompasses both policing and caretaking, Hamacher
| notes. In practice, its polarized qualities--"beneficial and
| harmful, intimate and distanced"--intertwine. Baby monitors use
| technology developed for the military. Many contemporary models
| run on CCTV.
|
| What does Jia think "CCTV" is, exactly?
| pbj1968 wrote:
| My demographics have me in a few paid survey groups. They've
| finally quit putting "prenatal vitamins", "diapers", and "toys"
| in the middle of "what has your household purchased in the last
| six months" surveys. I guess they finally figured out it's not
| happening.
| munchler wrote:
| I'm a non-Hispanic male in my mid-50's and I occasionally get
| diaper ads on YouTube, or random ads in Spanish. I'm moderately
| privacy conscious, but I don't do anything drastic to mask my
| activity. If the big tech companies are surveilling me so
| thoroughly, they're not always doing a great job using that info.
| XorNot wrote:
| People are very bad at understanding how large scale data
| collection works: namely, that it's entirely based on the law
| of large numbers. No one except under very specific
| circumstances cares who you are specifically, they care that
| they're right about that somewhat better then 50% of the time.
|
| Accidentally misfiring an ad has no consequences if it doesn't
| happen in place of a better targeted ad and you don't reliably
| abandon the platform as a result.
| anyonecancode wrote:
| This is why the idea you sometimes see floated that we should
| be able to sell our own personal data isn't really much of a
| solution. One person's data doesn't have much value on its
| own. If you were able to sell it, it'd be worth a few cents
| at most. Your data is only valuable as part of a large data
| set. I get the appeal of using capitalism to rein it its own
| excesses, but I really don't see anything short of strong
| regulation having a shot at regaining and maintaining our
| privacy.
| gs17 wrote:
| I had a pretty long period where all my Google ads were in
| Spanish and a lot of them implied my demographic profile was
| set to think I'm a 50+ year old gay Filipino (I am none of
| those things, as far as I know). It just gets really off target
| sometimes.
| hammock wrote:
| As someone in marketing, I'll point out that the technology has
| advanced quite a bit from the infamous Target case study.
|
| The most powerful signals now are not demographics and search
| history, but location, transactions and automatic content
| recognition (ACR).
|
| Transactions is pretty straightforward, your bank and/or payment
| networks sell your data to brokers at a merchant level. Many
| retailers sell your data at a SKU level.
|
| Location is less visible. There are various levels of granularity
| of location tracking and reporting built into many SDKs that are
| included in just about any mobile app you download, and that data
| is sold.
|
| Automated content recognition (ACR) is the craziest. The actual
| contents of your screen- the Instagram post, the TV show you are
| watching, etc (and its underlying transcript) are analyzed by the
| app or the TV, and sold often in real time to data brokers with
| such efficiency that you can be viewing the photo of the new Land
| Rover your friend just bought and posted, to your very next swipe
| being an ad for a Land Rover
| londons_explore wrote:
| Buuuut.... The flip side is that all these mechanisms are
| unreliable.
|
| They might match your phone up with someone elses laptop and
| you'll see ads for stuff they searched.
|
| They might get your location wrong by 1000 miles and suddenly
| all the ads are in French.
|
| You might have clicked no to a cookie banner so now you get to
| see ads for ED medication despite definitely not having a use
| for it...
|
| Advertising is all a numbers game, and they just aim to be
| mostly right most of the time.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Location and ACR may explain the ads I keep getting. But
| they're way off (because I'm cautious).
|
| I happen to live in one of country with the highest GDP per
| capita (higher than the US) and I also spend lots of time in
| another country, in France, on a very famous place on the
| french riviera. That'd be the location part.
|
| Then I love fast expensive sports cars. I just can't help it.
| Own two or three.
|
| So what kind of ads do I get all the time? Ads for very very
| very rich people. Ads that want to sell me private jets flights
| or... Directly private jets. Yup: I'm not kidding, I keep
| getting ads where this _insert many millions here_ private jets
| are for sale. Porsche cars: all the time.
|
| Needless to say: I don't have anywhere what it'd take to fly
| private, let alone buy a private jet (even used).
|
| But I find it funny: somehow the ad industry is thinking I'm
| completely ballin'.
|
| Now of course I make sure to not only click on the ads but also
| pretend I'm deeply interested: for example I'll make sure to
| Google _" Is a used Embraer better than a used Gulfstream?"_ :
| )
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The ads know that I'm a man in my 60s.
|
| Lots of ED ads, lots of "How to retire" ads, those weird ads with
| retouched old men with six-pack abs, the stupid intermittent
| fasting ads, etc.
|
| I do get the occasional run of Spanish-language ads. Not sure
| why.
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