In early 2012, the New York Times Magazine put out a cover story about Andrew Pole, a statistician working for Target who was tasked with inventing a way to identify potentially pregnant shoppers, even if those shoppers didn’t want the company to know. The rationale, Pole said, was that moms-to-be are a multi-million dollar market, and Target wanted a way to pepper these moneymakers with promos and coupons before its competitors did the same.
Pole obliged. After crawling through the freight of sale data from statewide shoppers on Target’s public baby registry, he came up with a “pregnancy prediction” score that the company would internally assign to each of its regular customers. If you believe the rumors (not everyone does!), Target’s algos were so accurate that the company sent coupons for cribs to a teenage girl before her own father knew she was due.
A decade later, the story reads less like a quirk of capitalism and more like an ominous sign. Now it’s not just Target, every company is hounding you for data. And thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision to overthrow Roe v. Wade, a good chunk of the nation’s police and private citizens can go after people seeking abortions and the doctors that would serve them if there’s enough evidence.
And in 2022, there is plenty of data to go around and plenty of players willing to pawn it off if the price is right. A Gizmodo investigation into some of the nation’s biggest data brokers found more than two dozen promoting access to datasets containing digital information on millions of pregnant and potentially pregnant people across the country. At least one of those companies also offered a large catalogue of people who were using the same sorts of birth control that’s being targeted by more restrictive states right now.
In total, Gizmodo identified 32 different brokers across the U.S. selling access to the unique mobile IDs from some 2.9 billion profiles of people pegged as “actively pregnant” or “shopping for maternity products.” Also on the market: data on 478 million customer profiles labeled “interested in pregnancy” or “intending to become pregnant.” You can see the full list of companies for yourself here.
In all cases, these datasets were sold on what’s known as a “CPM” or “cost per mille” basis—which essentially means that whoever buys them only pays for the number of end-users that are reached with a given ad. Depending on who was offering up a dataset, the price per user ranged from 49 cents per user reached to a whopping $2.25.
The datasets offer…
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