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.
Are we sure we can call that targeted pharmaceutical advertisement? It sounds like it could just be the algorithm accidentally discovering a correlation between expecting mothers and preference for unscented hand creams and such.
Unless Amazon did specifically program that in, I think these accidental correlation is not something you can control before it happens and trying to regulate them would be a waste of time and resources.
Of course, we could just ban ad tracking entirely and solve the problem in an instant.
IIRC, she miscarried and sued for the emotional distress of continued ads which followed the expected development of her (tragically lost) baby.
The republicans would love this technology but they’re to busy trying to figure out how to turn on their TV. What’s the wire thing in the back of it supposed to do? What about the little black brick with letters on it? It doesn’t even say anything useful like WTF is 123? 456? 789? I get it seven ate nine! It gets this one, its funny 🤣! Anyway it will take some time before the republicans could make use of tech like that… unless evil people help them.
Before I even knew I had gonorrhea, Alexa was recommending me penicillin. She also recommended I stay away from the local brothels. And to lay off the whiskey. Also, Alexa is my doctor.
It’s funny how in this country, the public rhetoric is inundated with people decrying this type of behavior from governments as “big brother” and 1984, but as soon as you slap an inc on the back and make it Big Brother, Inc everyone’s completely fine with it.
Too creepy? Or too crappy?
When I switched to Amazon pharmacy all I had to do was give them my name and birthday they were instantly able to find my insurance provider all of my active meds at my current pharmacy and order refill and switch pharmacy to Amazon all within 5 or 6 clicks. You can assume they already had this info from one way or another and the me clicking permissions was theater
