Hiding Your Pregnancy From the Internet Is Shockingly Difficult
LatestIt’s not just future grandparents who’re very keen to know the minute you’ve got a bun in the oven. Corporations want a heads-up so they can bombard you with ads; for marketers, all babies are royal babies. No surprise there! What is startling is just how hard it is to fly under their radar these days.
Mashable picks up a talk recently given at the Theorizing the Web conference by Princeton assistant sociology prof Janet Vertesi, who decided to treat her pregnancy as an experiment: What would it take to keep her good news a secret from the big data crunchers at places like Facebook and Target? What would it take to keep from tipping her own hand to corporations?
Now, it’s not really news that there’s a lot of money riding on pregnant women and companies are investing hugely in data-driven marketing that help them spot their gravid customers. A couple of years ago, the New York Times famously reported that Target was able to spot a teen’s pregnancy before her parents. We leave clues about ourselves everywhere—an Amazon order of What to Expect When You’re Expecting here, a big Pea in the Pod purchase there. Data-driven marketing companies that can add those clues up, accurately spot a pregnant woman and put ads in her face are rewarded handsomely. According to Vertesi, the average pregnant woman’s data is worth $1.50, compared to 10 cents for the average Joe. Think of the diaper sales alone!
What’s striking, though, is just how hard it’s become to opt out, even if you’re actively making an effort. It requires so, so much more than buying your prenatal vitamins in cash. That’s just table stakes. First, Vertesi asked her friends and family to keep the news off Facebook and other social media platforms. She browsed for baby products using Tor, the technology that shields your IP address that you might recognize from stories about child porn, Bitcoin and underground drug bazaar Silk Road.