Quote:
Originally Posted by mickthinks
Spurious, because a guess, however well-informed, is not secret knowledge. And ludicrous, because fathers don't have a right to be the first to know all their daughters' secrets.
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No, that's not the issue, although you do touch on it. It's the daughter's secret, and stores are employing elaborate datamining techniques and predictive models to discover information about people's private lives. Target isn't just a gossipy shopkeeper. It's a giant corporation employing teams of analysts to troll vasts swaths of data for indicators of private information, including private medical information, about people who shop in their stores; and they're using that information to make assumptions about people.
In fact, a while ago, I had a really weird thing happen to me. I started getting brochures and gigantic postcards and stuff from a local hospital (that I've never been to) about organ prolapse. I suspect it has something to do with another person whose information is conflated with mine as a result of some sloppy work, but maybe it's just because of the astonishing volume of buttsex supplies I'm always buying or something. For whatever reason, though, this hospital intimated to my mailman that I threw a sleeve or something.
So I guess I could try to casually bring up the fact that I have no prolapsed organs to my mailman, but what if I actually did? Why would that be anyone's business but my own and my doctor's?
Most people pay for things with credit or debit cards, so retailers have an astonishing amount of information about people's personal lives, and it's currently being used for a huge variety of purposes, potentially including credit rating and insurance scoring; and there has been pretty much nothing done in the US to legally limit how datamining companies, retailers, and other corporations use that information, or to control them for accuracy. What if my health insurance company decided to raise my rates because they think I have a prolapse? What if my homeowners' insurance had data that said that people with prolapse were more likely to file claims, or if a credit reporting agency decided to lower my score based on some correlation? What if an employment check revealed, accurately or not, that a candidate for a job was either currently pregnant or likely to become pregnant soon?
Things like that happen all the time already, and the individuals being reported on aren't even told about it or given any means to correct or dispute information being reported on them. These things are all problems.