Predictive Analytics Informed Consent And Privacy: The Case Of Target

We are sharing this blog post by our colleague Vivek Krishnamurthy regarding an article in last weekend's New York Times Magazine that 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 interesting consent and privacy issues. Vivek's practice focuses on corporate social responsibility, but increasingly, that subject crosses over into data privacy issues.

The article, and Vivek's post, have looked at the uses of "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.