How Companies Learn Your Secrets

Source: Charles Duhigg
Affiliation: The New York Times Magazine

In this article, the author tells the story of how Target learned to identify when women are pregnant to target ads at them. The author dives into the psychology of habit-forming and how advertising has to adjust itself to appeal to already-engrained habits unless customers are in a time of major transition to explain why Target targeted pregnant women in particular.

Keywords: Advertising , Big Data , Computer Science , Privacy , Surveillance , Tech Ethics , Tech Industry