Case 28: Targeting Consumers (and Using Their Secrets)
1. What are the social and ethical issues in this case? Who are the affected stakeholders and
what are their stakes?
Target’s predictive data mining intruded into the personal lives of the women it targeted. Its
2. Target’s practice of predicting a woman’s pregnancy and then exploiting it commercially was
legal. Was it ethical? If you were the woman in the case and you learned what Target had done,
what terms would you use to describe their practice?
Target might argue that the actions were ethical, as they sought ultimately to provide women
3. Would you feel deceived, tricked, or exploited if a company predicted a purchasing
expectation of yours that you felt was private or intimate? What, if anything, would you do about
it?
4. How do you evaluate Target’s new approach to disguise the ads by mixing them in with other,
unrelated ads?
5. What is your assessment of Facebook’s efforts to protect consumers’ privacy? Or, is it really
to protect the company should questions be raised?
Facebook’s efforts to protect consumer privacy stem from the public’s outcry over their
approach to privacy issues in the past. The 5-person review panel that will evaluate privacy
6. Have companies gone too far in their statistical analytics and use of Big Data and data
mining such as that described in this case? Is it ethical for companies to use data mining to
target market customers based on the patterns they detected?
Yes, it appears as though companies have gone too far in their use of statistical analytics and use
of Big Data. Target is able to tell by virtue of a woman’s buying and browsing patterns if she is