PrivacyMedium
Target Suggested Maternity-Related Advertisements to a Teenage Girl's Home, Allegedly Correctly Predicting Her Pregnancy via Algorithm
- Occurred
- Jun 1, 2003
- Published
- Jul 16, 2020
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Target recommended maternity-related items to a family in Atlanta via ads, allegedly predicting their teenage daughter’s pregnancy before her father did, although critics have called into question the predictability of the algorithm and the authenticity of its claims.
Developers
- Target
Deployers
- Target
Harmed parties
- Target customers
- Privacy
- Biometric data subjects
- Consumers
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 80%
Rationale: Algorithm predicted sensitive personal health data without explicit consent, raising privacy concerns.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8