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…

Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to m…

Target didn’t figure out a teenager was pregnant before her father did, and that one article that said they did was silly and bad.

In 2012, a story was published in the New York Times under the headline How Companies Learn Your Secrets. The…