Predictive Analytics, Informed Consent, And Privacy: The Case Of Target

A fascinating article in last weekend's New York Times Magazine discusses the powerful statistical techniques that some companies are using to analyze sales and other data in order to gain insights into their customers' behaviors and needs. The article raises a number of difficult consent and privacy issues.

The feature-length piece by Charles Duhigg uses the "predictive analytics" program developed by Target, America's third-biggest retailer, as a case study to illustrate how companies are combining data from customer interactions with other information obtained from commercial databases to draw strikingly detailed portraits of individual customers.

By combining information on the kinds of goods an individual purchases from their stores over several visits with other information about that individual's sociodemographic characteristics (such as age, ethnicity, and level of education) gleaned from public records databases, Target's predictive analytics program can