this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
199 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
59038 readers
3747 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There was a article years ago. A young woman started getting Target coupons for diapers and baby formula. A few weeks later she found out she was pregnant. She had been using her loyalty card to make purchases and had bought unscented hand cream and some other low perfume things that apparently are usually purchased by people who are expecting as their sense of smell becomes heightened and the sents become overwhelming.
Honestly I'd like to see a ban on targeted pharmaceutical advertisement. Prescription medication should be between you and your doctor.
And then what they found was that to be more effective was to mix up the suggestions for late term pregnancy / early childhood products with basically random nonsense...
... because if its too obvious that they are highly statistically confident that they know things about you that they shouldn't, people get weirded out and are less likely to buy something so specifically targeted at them.
They know an insane amount, and they do not want you to know that they know that much.
To play the devil's advocate, they could be putting that random junk there to see if they can find out other categories of things that you like.
¿Porque no los dos?
Why couldn't it be both?