Retailer's data analysis can identify pregnancies - it could also identify abortions

[DBoon]

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=6&_r=1&hp

Consumers going through major life events often don’t notice, or care, that their shopping habits have shifted, but retailers notice, and they care quite a bit. At those unique moments, Andreasen wrote, customers are “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.” In other words, a precisely timed advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can change someone’s shopping patterns for years.

And among life events, none are more important than the arrival of a baby. At that moment, new parents’ habits are more flexible than at almost any other time in their adult lives. If companies can identify pregnant shoppers, they can earn millions.
...
Pole applied his program to every regular female shopper in Target’s national database and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related products, the company’s cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and clothing, as well. When Pole shared his list with the marketers, he said, they were ecstatic. Soon, Pole was getting invited to meetings above his paygrade. Eventually his paygrade went up.
...
About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

Now imagine if instead of an irate father showing up at a local Target, you have a police officer with a warrant for your arrest for suspicion of having an abortion?

This article is not specifically about abortions, but it does indicate the scope and predictive power of retail data analysis.

What if you fit the pregnancy shopping profile but do not register a birth by the due date?

[JustAnotherGen]

1. Data Tracking didn't exist in 1789

Also - cell phones, Internet, Target . . .

Could be a way.

I'm really hoping a few American women who are Jewish will sue their states. I would help fund those cases.

[Ilsa]

2. Young women need to turn off their cell phones when shopping,

use cash when shopping for anything related to menstrual cycles, pregnancy tests, etc. They'll need to be very careful about posting anything health related online. Maybe not even report the date of their last menstrual period to their doctor.

Frankly, I don't know why my doctor needed to know when I had my last period for a routine exam.

[RockRaven]

3. That degree of secrecy isn't enough. These "big data" algorithms can spot pregnant individuals

without any inputs related to pregnancy, menstruation, sex. They sift out and connect the tiniest mundane details.

[DBoon]

8. exactly the point of the article

[Hekate]

6. Your doc has a legitimate reason for asking. Some meds will reduce effectiveness of contraceptives

… thus making the patient vulnerable to getting pregnant. Some medications cause fetal deformity or fetal death. Aside from that, being pregnant is a whole-body event, and your doc should know.

[The Unmitigated Gall]

4. I'll happily go buy diapers and onsies, to skew that database.

[2naSalit]

9. Me too.

[Wingus Dingus]

5. Now that abortion is completely illegal in some states, can those states

prosecute mothers who don't seek or comply with medical care for their pregnancies? I mean, is the goal just to force a woman to be an incubator for however long the pregnancy lasts, or does she also have to do everything the state dictates in order to produce a live, healthy (low-cost) baby? Where does it end?

[Hekate]

7. Yes, it is their goal. They consider a miscarriage to be a woman's fault, or possibly an abortion...

… in the first place.