To hide the pregnancy from marketing companies, woman use Tor

Two years ago, many were surprised news that US retail chain Target learned of the pregnant girl before her father. "She still goes to school, and you send her coupons for baby clothes and diapers?" - Then shouted an angry father. No wonder: a simple data mining purchase history with reference to a discount or credit card.

It turns out that many marketing companies are now actively trying to find exactly pregnant women, because they are on the threshold of a large number of predictable purchases. Therefore, retailers and manufacturers of children's products a lot to pay for this information. In the era of targeted advertising the mere fact of pregnancy about 200 times increases the cost of the user profile.

Marketers literally "hunt" for pregnant women, trying to find them in different databases, including the history of surfing through tracking cookies on search queries, the texts of personal e-mails and messages on social networks. Who knows, perhaps they guessed scan public photo in the photo social network with the recognition characteristic rounded images.

Associate Professor of Sociology at Princeton University Janet Vertes (Janet Vertesi) is part of the management of the Centre for the development of rules for the regulation of IT (Center for Information Technology Policy). This fact is important to understand the reasons unusual experiment , which she organized with his participation.

Janet decided to see if she could hide from the ubiquitous marketers fact her pregnancy for nine months. Firstly, telling friends and relatives the good news over the phone, she warned everyone about the experiment and asked him not to mention the pregnancy in the postal correspondence and congratulations on social networks.

As Janet could not abandon the use of the Internet and visit specialized forums, it does have downloaded Tor. All purchases made in stores only for cash. Had to abandon the discount for loyalty programs. Even on Amazon had to create a new account, tied to the new mail with your domain name. In the online store fearless woman was paying gift cards bought for Cash, and ordered goods to a safe address.

Janet admits that it was a difficult time. For example, for a period of seven months, the father congratulated pregnancy in a personal message on Facebook. She replied rudely: immediately delete the message and otfrendila father. When asked why he did it, my father said that do not post a message in the open tape. Another friend mentioned the "secret information" in chat Facebook. Obviously, many people do not realize the fact of automatic scanning of personal correspondence and chats.

The experiment resulted in a completely unexpected (or, conversely, expected) results. A few months Janet Vertes joked with friends that because of the Tor Browser and permanent withdrawals of cash from an ATM, it can attract the attention of the security services. And one day, when her husband left for the next portion of Amazon gift cards to a local store, it still warned that the store operates daily limit on the number of cards purchased, then the store will inform the law enforcement agencies.

By the way, the board use only cash in stores can already be considered outdated. The fact that shopping malls have become fashionable and fake WiFi-hotspots , so soon merchants will be able to determine the name of the buyer, even if he has paid in cash. To do this, you need to associate a phone number, "route" to cash the check and time of penetration. Thus, in addition to cash withdrawals at ATMs, in front of the store need more and disable WiFi on your mobile device or use program to randomize the MAC-addresses .

Janet Vertes experience has shown that in modern society simply trying to defend their rights and to avoid targeted advertising leads to unpleasant consequences. You can not normally communicate with family, we have to feel almost criminal. In other words, for privacy, we are paying too high a price. Simply opt out of the privacy and accept the advertisement. This is a problem, first of all, the American legislation which regulates trade rather weak personal data of citizens, compared with the EU legislation.

Source: habrahabr.ru/post/221615/