How to not let the internet know you're pregnant
April 30, 2014 6:56 AM   Subscribe

"And finally, I'm actually here today to win the 'Most Creative Use of Tor' award," she said, followed by roars of laughter in the audience. "I really couldn't have done it without Tor, because Tor was really the only way to manage totally untraceable browsing. I know it's gotten a bad reputation for Bitcoin trading and buying drugs online, but I used it for BabyCenter.com."-- How Janet Vertesi tried and hid her pregnancy from the internet and big data. (Direct link to her presentation.)
posted by MartinWisse (61 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
So, uhm, she emailed family "directly"?
posted by dhoe at 7:04 AM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


I love that her strategies put up a bunch of red flags for illegal activities/money laundering. Is that the future of commerce? People who pay in cash or order products anonymously are automatically reported for investigation?
posted by Think_Long at 7:10 AM on April 30, 2014 [4 favorites]


For her next trick she should see how long she can keep her kid out of the system, the future may need a real version of "Repairman Jack".
posted by 445supermag at 7:11 AM on April 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


According to Vertesi, the average person's marketing data is worth 10 cents; a pregnant woman's data skyrockets to $1.50. And once targeted advertising finds a pregnant woman, it won't let up.

Is it that bad? I once googled diamonds just because I was interested in different formations and settings, and for weeks afterwards google provided deBeers links on every page. But I just ignored it like every other ad.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 7:12 AM on April 30, 2014 [3 favorites]


It would be interesting to create some sort of spreadsheet/app thing that catalogs all of the targeted advertisements you see throughout the day. You could graph the categories throughout your lifetime, and they would probably correlate with all of your significant life events, your passing hobbies, or the month when your girlfriend was using your computer to research vacuum cleaners.
posted by Think_Long at 7:15 AM on April 30, 2014 [3 favorites]


The link to her presentation isn't loadng right on my phone, so maybe she addresses this, but she only avoided direct tells (is posting on fb, buying baby gear on Amazon), but what about the indirect stuff like when you buy innocuous seeming items xyz and the marketers infer that you're pregnant. That's far more worrisome and I wonder how successful she was in guarding against that.
posted by matildatakesovertheworld at 7:15 AM on April 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


It's that bad. For women whose pregnancies don't have successful outcomes, being followed for years by online baby marketing can be particularly painful. I know this firsthand. And having had two children afterward, I get DAILY emails from various online baby purveyors who know how old my kids are and target the emails accordingly. Obvs. I knew what data I was providing when I bought things from Amazon and browsed BabyCenter but only in the realm of baby marketing have I seen that data so thoroughly used.
posted by annathea at 7:16 AM on April 30, 2014 [26 favorites]


People who pay in cash or order products anonymously are automatically reported for investigation?

I came here to say the same thing:

Those kinds of activities, when you take them in the aggregate ... are exactly the kinds of things that tag you as likely engaging in criminal activity

If you act like you are hiding something, right now, your behaviour can attract attention. For better or worse, there are a bunch of fences designed so we don't see them in our regular lives: use of anonymous spending, excess movements of cash, spending patterns of a particular type (sudden binge spending on a credit card). Some are designed to protect us (from, e.g., id theft), some to detect criminal behaviour. They're calibrated, by the banks and the security infrastructure to be just beyond normal.

She and her husband tripped at least one of those live wires. I don't think it's necessarily evil that those (mostly soft) limits exist around our public identities and behavior. Many exist for our own and others' protection. However, I think it's important that we know these fences exist and where they are. That's not always clear, especially with the non-governmental ones.
posted by bonehead at 7:19 AM on April 30, 2014 [3 favorites]


The internet has ads? Is this something I'd need to uninstall ABP to know about?
posted by signal at 7:19 AM on April 30, 2014 [8 favorites]


I find this pretty hard to believe. But interesting post!
posted by KokuRyu at 7:22 AM on April 30, 2014


signal: “The internet has ads? Is this something I'd need to uninstall ABP to know about?”

It probably would be a good idea to uninstall ABP and install AB instead, since ABP is advertising-funded. Adblock "Plus" has a whitelist that advertisers can pay to be put on. It's "plus" in the sense of "plus lots of ads." The original AdBlock is the one you want.
posted by koeselitz at 7:23 AM on April 30, 2014 [18 favorites]


Big Data is mostly Big Dumb for me.

"Oh I see you just a DVD/BluRay player. Would you like to buy another and another and another? We will keep asking for a month."
posted by srboisvert at 7:24 AM on April 30, 2014 [8 favorites]


The worst thing is when my son watches user-generated Minecraft videos on my YouTube account. I get suggestions by email for months afterword, inviting me to watch the dumb things.
posted by KokuRyu at 7:25 AM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'm reminded of the story a little while ago about Target figuring out a girl was pregnant.
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.

One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
posted by fight or flight at 7:25 AM on April 30, 2014 [6 favorites]


Well said annathea.
posted by lextex at 7:26 AM on April 30, 2014


She mentions in the video she bought a whole bunch of Amazon gift cards in cash. Presumably it is a way to launder money, which may have been the reason her husband's transaction was flagged, and there was only a correlation with her baby project.
posted by KokuRyu at 7:26 AM on April 30, 2014


Adblock "Plus" has a whitelist that advertisers can pay to be put on.

Which you can disable in the settings.
posted by MartinWisse at 7:28 AM on April 30, 2014 [5 favorites]


Yeah, and there is some back and forth about it, but I think it's worth knowing that there are advertising dollars at play there.
posted by koeselitz at 7:33 AM on April 30, 2014


If big data were so prescient, they'd be able to distinguish my youtube usage from my son's (a la KokuRyu), Spotify would recommend music I actually like, Facebook wouldn't keep insisting I follow burlesque dancers and wannabe pop starlets, I'd get spam about photography gear and musical instruments instead of agricultural equipment, and Pinterest wouldn't think I'm a middle aged white woman from Rhode Island with an interest in hand-made doilies.
Unless it's a trick to lull you into complacency by apparent incompetence, in which case, well played.
posted by signal at 7:35 AM on April 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


What a lot of work to go through, and isolation to embrace, in order to... Um... Do... Not get... Something?
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 7:39 AM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


I've mentioned Janet Vertesi on MeFi before, in the context of her human-robot interaction studies.
posted by zamboni at 7:41 AM on April 30, 2014


I just wish there was an ad blocker for safari that would take care of all the YouTube ads without making everything grind to a halt.

I've known for years that the aggregate pattern of my searches would provide a pretty comprehensive window into my finances, interests, and plans, with some odd dead ends thrown in for good measure.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:41 AM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Everything is amazing but nobody wants to be advertised to. Did anybody expect that online commerce - all the convenience and competitive pricing - was going to be built on a platform of respect for the consumer's desire to be left alone?

I think it sucks to get spam also, and it must be awful to get baby spam after a miscarriage, but Gmail does a pretty good job filtering it and I really like being able to buy pants from my bed at 3 a.m. So I participate in the benefits, and I have to go to a little trouble to lower the volume on the advertising. I've heard people who profess to be creeped out by google showing them shoe ads after they shopped online for shoes, and I just don't get it.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 8:01 AM on April 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance...[s]o Target got sneakier about sending the coupons. The company can create personalized booklets; instead of sending people with high pregnancy scores books o’ coupons solely for diapers, rattles, strollers, and the “Go the F*** to Sleep” book, they more subtly spread them about

Actually, Target ditched their customer loyalty tracking entirely very shortly after all this came out and switched to a store credit card system.
posted by srboisvert at 8:06 AM on April 30, 2014


> I think it sucks to get spam also, and it must be awful to get baby spam after a miscarriage, but Gmail does a pretty good job filtering it and I really like being able to buy pants from my bed at 3 a.m.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders

Feels like I'm sharing nothin' at all!

Nothin' at all!

Nothin' at all!
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 8:14 AM on April 30, 2014 [9 favorites]


There's the genuine awful bits, and then there's the fact I find hilarious that Amazon periodically goes on this binge of being really sure that I must be hiding an infant somewhere because I figured out that those diaper disposal bags work better for cleaning the catbox than the bags I get at the grocery, that don't tie tightly and half the time have holes in them.

I don't mind getting ads for things I might want, but there's a thing about balance. There's such a thing as overfishing. It might indeed be valuable to know things about what people want and when they want it, but if you share that data around to so many people that the new mom decides that all the messages she's gotten are spam, then that data has suddenly lost a lot of value compared to when only a couple people knew.

I kind of wonder if we're going to start seeing conflicts in Big Data as places start trying to keep competitors from aggregating the same information they're aggregating, because it's no longer going to be enough to know the consumer really well, you also have to make sure that you're the only one who does.
posted by Sequence at 8:27 AM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Amazon is pretty terrible. If I am logged into Amazon and I look at something, a few hours later I will get suggestions in my email about what I ought to buy.

The solution is to not use Amazon, or at least log into Amazon using a different browser profile and a different email address. Of course most people don't have the time or patience to do this sort of thing.


My biggest biggest biggest irritation is with Goodreads, which doesn't even *try* to send out interesting monthly recommendations, despite knowing *exactly* what I like to read. The monthly "recommendations" are generic and sent to everybody, books I have no interest in.

I think it's kind of a big deal, because books and reading are an interest of mine, and I have the potential to be a totally engaged "customer" or email recipient, and I find it almost offensive (or in the very least, totally off-putting) that Goodreads send me recommendations for all sorts of best-seller, pseudo-highbrow dreck. And they should know better - they are owned by Amazon after all.

I hope there is a Goodreads product manager reading this thread.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:32 AM on April 30, 2014 [6 favorites]


I block all ads except for on a couple of sites I want to support, unsub or block just about all marketing emails, and run Ghostery everywhere, so I don't get much in the way of targeted stuff. Amazon *tries* to target me, but they don't seem particularly good at it -- they decided I was a drug dealer after I brought a creme brulee torch, for example.
posted by tavella at 8:44 AM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Goodreads used to send "new releases by authors on your shelves", which seems to have gone to be mostly "genres on your shelves", which means I get a lot of uninteresting stuff. Their once fantastic "upcoming releases this month by authors on your shelves" pages are essentially useless now, too. I just haven't found anything better.

But obviously I'm a really boring person -- or I buy the wrong things -- because I never get targeted ads or email.
posted by jeather at 8:45 AM on April 30, 2014


A while ago, someone linked to "The Very Virile Viking," probably as an example of how romance novels (the supposedly more subtle "porn for women") is not necessarily really all the subtle.

I made the mistake of clicking the link, which was to the amazon sales page for said title.

Now, Amazon has made me aware of an entire genre of shirtless viking novels. All by the same author.
posted by subversiveasset at 8:45 AM on April 30, 2014 [3 favorites]


I think part of the problem for me and Goodreads is that I have really specific tastes in books I add to my shelves - the reason is I want to find other people reading these books.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:47 AM on April 30, 2014


Amazon's recommendations are often ridiculous. If you buy something, like an iron or coffee pot, you'd think they'd want to suggest you buy an ironing board or coffee accessories. But instead my experience is that they suggest more irons and coffee pots.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:04 AM on April 30, 2014 [8 favorites]


Kinda funny. Would be insanely easy to achieve the same ends with a few firefox or google addons. Tor is massive overkill.
posted by jjmoney at 9:05 AM on April 30, 2014


Now, Amazon has made me aware of an entire genre of shirtless viking novels. All by the same author.

THIS IS AN ASPECT OF DRAGONS I HAD NOT CONSIDERED
posted by zamboni at 9:07 AM on April 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


tavella: "Amazon *tries* to target me, but they don't seem particularly good at it -- they decided I was a drug dealer after I brought a creme brulee torch, for example."

I am still regularly bemused by Amazon trying to sell me books I have in fact already bought from them within the space of less than a year. I would love to know the logic behind that.
posted by chavenet at 9:18 AM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Today on the radio here in the Netherlands there was another one of those interviews with marketeers about the relative merits of facebook campaigns versus email campaigns.

And, yet again, the concept of people who simply do not want any crap in their inbox, and will actively blacklist companies that manage to get through the spam filters, does not seem to exist in the minds of the marketeers. In a way they are just advertising for themselves in these interviews, proud of the ways where their campaigns have "higher response rates".

Today, the guy was actually proud that he managed to have people look at his email newsletters for an average of a whole 5 seconds. Mostly thanks to the fact that people read mail more on their smartphones, not even because his newsletters were any better. But hey! Advertising in a newspaper averages below one second, so he must be truly magnificent in his work!

This was finely targeted email, and he got a whole 5 seconds out of it, imagine how annoyed people are by un-targeted advertising.


Sometimes I think we should tell these people we don't want their advertising the same way Noriega was told it was time to surrender his position in Panama.
posted by DreamerFi at 9:18 AM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


I was reminded of another big-data advertising story I saw recently: The (Unintentional) Amazon Guide to Dealing Drugs.
posted by fings at 9:22 AM on April 30, 2014


And, yet again, the concept of people who simply do not want any crap in their inbox, and will actively blacklist companies that manage to get through the spam filters, does not seem to exist in the minds of the marketeers.

A big part of my job is running opt-in email campaigns that focus on engagement, and I can guarantee that competent marketers care very very very much about spam complaints, and unsubscribes. As a matter of fact the tools and providers we use demand extremely low spam complaint rates (1% is considered very very high) and will blacklist you if you have "too many spams."

In an era where people buy everything from food to clothes to insurance to television shows online, email marketing is not going to go away. And if you are tactful, and provide relevant and useful info, as a "marketeer" you are providing value (in the context of buying and selling stuff, that is, but not, say in the context of saving the planet or whatever) to both the consumers and the people selling them products.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:31 AM on April 30, 2014




A nice unintended side effect of Google's advertising dominance is that I find you don't even need to go full ABP/AB anymore. As long as you're using one of the social media blockers (such as Disconnect, or Ghostery for more anonymous browsing) that cuts off Google's ad network, well, it's surprising how little non-Google advertising there is out there.
posted by ceribus peribus at 9:47 AM on April 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


It's really weird to watch YouTube when I'm not signed in to my regular Chrome browser. So many banner ads! Same with Facebook.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:58 AM on April 30, 2014


I was at this plenary, and it was excellent. I recommend watching the other presentations, since they provide other perspectives on big data. I'll give credit to the guy who was there to defend data collection, since he was definitely in the minority in the room. I didn't agree with him whatsoever, but I appreciated the diversity of perspective.

I feel like, to a certain extent, this makes a lot more sense in context with the other talks, which tie big data trends into state surveillance and political resistance. The commercial surveillance aspect my seem trivial, but in many ways it is tied directly to the larger construct of state surveillance, and to a cultural perception of data collection and surveillance. She makes it clear in her presentation that this was a way to achieve an empirical understanding of what it's like to avoid the banal day-to-day surveillanc of marketers, and the interesting conclusion is that even with a relatively benign goal of not being commodified as a pregnant woman she ends up having to go through many of the activities that those involved in shadow economies have to take to make their living.

It was a great parallel with the panel on online sex-work directly before this (credit to the conference organizers and the plenary moderators). One of the major ideas floated in that panel was the idea that sex workers, by necessity, must be savvy about how they navigate their online presences, and that often we can see strategies of surveillance and repression in those communities before it hits the larger, mainstream public. One example was Amazon's efforts to algorithmically identify sex workers who maintained wish lists and pre-emptively shut them down.

As pointed out in the discussion following the panels, there are two sides to big data collection and surveillance methods. On the one hand, there is the hope by companies that better analytics (that is, more clear understanding of customers through data aggregation) will result in better advertising which benefits the advertisers (the ads are effective instead of ignored), will benefit the platform (better advertising revenue means more money from advertisers and more engagement from users) and the user themselves (advertising becomes a source of value instead of irritation).

The other side of this is that what may seem inncuous and maybe even beneficial presents new opportunities for those with the technological power to access those opportunities: that is, domestic spying programs, and hostile governments. It's a difficult tension which is still being resolved. Approaching it from a tech-centric, solutionist standpoint seems impossible (to me). Running adblock in a browser solves part of the problem, but isn't necessarily viable for a majority of the population. And even then you're still broadcasting all types of information from your phone, which is extremely difficult to block or even obfuscate if you're a tech inclined person, much less someone who wants their phone to simply work and not hae to futz with it. Look at how little traction diaspora has gained, after all.

The main problem here is one of icomprehensible complexity. Even those who are somehow able to negotiate the difficult and degrading task of moderating each piece of data that flow out from them (as the presenter is, at the cost of effort and intimacy with her family) have no idea how the data that does escape is being aggregated. That's one of the plus sides of the Snowden leak, is that it provided a very brief glimpse behind the curtain, at the banal, ridiculous slide deck of NSA techs explaining those algorithms to the higher ups.
posted by codacorolla at 10:18 AM on April 30, 2014 [5 favorites]


KokuRyu, I believe you. Unfortunately, you're the exception. My gmail account was harvested by a dutch spammer who makes his money with referrer clicks. Every time his daily message mentions a large company, I contact the large company to inform them they are paying spammers for leads. The amount of ignorance I encounter is staggering.
posted by DreamerFi at 10:28 AM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Hulu appears convinced I am a teenaged girl based on my (ABC Family-heavy) viewing habits, and basically all the ads it shows me are for menstrual pads, tampons, birth control, lube, condoms, the morning after pill, discount diapers, and low-cost family minivans.

Hulu has DEFINITE OPINIONS on teenaged girls and sex.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:32 AM on April 30, 2014 [3 favorites]


Anyway, to get the discussion back to big data and data collection, here is a good essay on the Quantified Toilet hoax
posted by DreamerFi at 10:52 AM on April 30, 2014


I have entertained myself by guessing what will trigger which ads. All started when I was exploring bankruptcy info about a person who named me a creditor with a daughter who let me know that she was expecting and a discussion about a friends Alzheimers.

Obviously data collection will get more sophisticated but in the meantime there should be a button that says...you guessed wrong.
posted by OhSusannah at 11:12 AM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Amazon still send me recommendations for things that I've already bought from Amazon.
posted by vbfg at 11:15 AM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Same here, Megami. I've been shopping on Amazon since 1998 or so, and I don't think I've ever been sent an e-mail from them to buy stuff.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:18 PM on April 30, 2014


I am not a privacy ninja and use the internet way too much. What's going on?

I took the emails reference to mean that they were seeing targeted stuff in the ads sidebar in gmail while reading unrelated emails, but I'm not sure.
posted by elizardbits at 12:23 PM on April 30, 2014


You probably did at one point, but then changed your settings to stop Amazon from sending them.
posted by zabuni at 12:42 PM on April 30, 2014


Eyebrows, the last time I watched stuff on Hulu, I got something like four Botox ads in a row, and after that I wasn't entirely sure I could cope with Hulu's advertising. So I think maybe they actually have a thing for judgmental profiling.
posted by Sequence at 1:09 PM on April 30, 2014


Unless it's a trick to lull you into complacency by apparent incompetence, in which case, well played.

I don't have AB installed, partly because I'm curious about what the data pool is showing. It's usually aggressively tone-deaf about picking up cues and interpreting them in wrong ways, like offering pearls before swine. But that said, it has gotten more competent in the past year or so.
posted by ovvl at 1:19 PM on April 30, 2014


You probably did at one point, but then changed your settings to stop Amazon from sending them.

I also buy lots from Amazon and I don't get these emails. If this is the explanation, then I'm confused how KokuRyu is savvy and motivated enough to use a different browser profile etc., and in fact is professionally involved in opt-in email campaigns, yet wouldn't just uncheck the box in the Amazon profile. I'm not intending this as an insult, KokuRyu--just that I don't understand.
posted by polecat at 1:45 PM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


A significant percentage of "recommendations" from Amazon are products that publishers/producers paid Amazon to feature and promote in their store, just like candy companies pay Walmart to put their products in tempting impulse-shopping displays at the checkout counter. I'd be very surprised if most "recommended" products weren't determined this way. The places where your tastes don't match the "recommendations" are where you ran afoul of the "sophisticated algorithm determining what you're most likely to buy from this list of our advertisers." They're not going to bother matching your book purchasing against all the books in the world to find your one! true! book! match when they can make more money matching you against List of Books We're Promoting This Week.
posted by nicebookrack at 2:50 PM on April 30, 2014


You probably did at one point, but then changed your settings to stop Amazon from sending them.

I have definitely never received an email from amazon that wasn't a "you just made this purchase" or "this purchase is on its way". I didn't even know such things were possible, and I have been using amazon for (oh my god how) over 15 years.
posted by elizardbits at 2:55 PM on April 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


I get e-mail ads from Amazon all the time. I thought everybody did.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:53 PM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]




I get e-mail ads from Amazon all the time. I thought everybody did.

Looks like I was wrong. This is really weird. I wonder what the trigger is for people to get the emails?
posted by zabuni at 8:40 AM on May 1, 2014


Dunno, but if you don't want to get the e-mails you can change your settings here.

I do get e-mails as an "Amazon Associate," and I can't opt out of those.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:45 AM on May 1, 2014


Three days after I brought my first child home from the hospital, I got a box containing $60 worth of free formula in the mail. This was particularly irritating because 3 days is just about when breastfeeding for the first time is the freakiest and one's doubts are highest. I have zero issue with people who choose to formula feed, but I found it really poor form to target that formula delivery for what is statistically just a day or two before when people frequently start to get the hang of the whole breastfeeding thing.
posted by KathrynT at 10:33 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]


Same thing happened to me, and it pissed me off so much. That kind of marketing violates WHO standards, but unfortunately it's legal in the US.
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:02 AM on May 1, 2014


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