How Companies Learn Your Secrets

A fascinating and in-depth article in the New York Times - covering predictive analytics, habit formation, new product marketing psychology, ethical considerations and scaring customers.  Definitely worth a read by anyone interested in understanding how sophisticated the analytics initiatives are at some of the world's largest retailers. Beyond that it goes into a very interesting discussion on the psychology of habit which would be broadly interesting to anyone.

It begins... Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”       

The full article can be found here.