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?
2.
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?
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.
unrelated ads?
5. privacy? Or, is it really
to protect the company should questions be raised?
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?
