Big Data part 1 – Who or What is Big Data?

I have been reluctant to talk about Big Data. It is a huge topic, and researching it can take you to some strange and creepy corners of the internet. But in the over all story of stoping junk mail, and keeping it stopped it is important. To Big Data you are not a person, but a file made up of data points. They are not sending junk mail to you, but to your data points.

CNN’s Ed Lavandera talking about data broker acxiom

In this New York Times article they tell the story of Target using buying habits to figure out if a woman is pregnant, with a great anecdote involving an angry father who was a casualty in the data mining war:

As the marketers explained to Pole — and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still speaking and before Target told him to stop — new parents are a retailer’s holy grail. Most shoppers don’t buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target — cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet paper. But Target sells everything from milk to stuffed animals to lawn furniture to electronics, so one of the company’s primary goals is convincing customers that the only store they need is Target. But it’s a tough message to get across, even with the most ingenious ad campaigns, because once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained, it’s incredibly difficult to change them.

Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. “Can you give us a list?” the marketers asked.

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive told me. “We do that for grocery products all the time.” But for pregnant women, Target’s goal was selling them baby items they didn’t even know they needed yet.

“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

Mrs. Smith has just bought prenatal vitamins. Send diaper coupons out to her STAT!

Pregnant women are such a target that this woman tried to go her whole pregnancy without advertisers or the internet finding out. Instead of acting like a mother to be, she ended up acting like a criminal.

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Article by Advertising Age that talks about how retailers have all this data about us, but they don’t know how to use it properly.

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Visa, the world’s largest credit card network, can predict how likely you are to get a divorce.

How big data helped Trump become president 

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Some stories about Big Data by Melanie Hicken the reporter who contacted me.

Find out what Big Data knows about you (it may be very wrong)

Big Data is secretly scoring you

Big Data: Look who’s buying your personal information

Feds say it’s time to regulate Big Data

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How about some TED Talks? Everyone loves TED Talks: 9 TED Talks about Big Data

Now that you are hiding under the bed clutching on to your data, come back tomorrow and I will show you how to take control of the information about you that is floating around.

Today’s image is of the ENIAC. It is a part of a Fortune piece about the women who programed the ENIAC.