The Downside to Big Data

¶ … Data Mining Habits

There are several advantages to the type of customer data collection process that Hill (2012) indicated Target is employing on its customers. One is that it enables the company to due highly specific, targeted marketing efforts. Thus, the company can become more effective in marketing products and services to customers. Also, customers can derive benefit from this sort of analysis. They can receive coupons and promotional offers that are tailored to their individual shopping habits and needs. As such, they can purchase more at Target for less money, while sating their shopping and lifestyles needs in the process.

However, there are both legal and ethical ramifications of the sort of data mining and analytics that Target is utilizing on its customers. These predominantly pertain to privacy. In the use case Hill (2015) references, the store was able to glean that a young woman was pregnant before her family was able to do so. This use case indicates that these sophisticated big data analytics can uncover intimate details about a person's life. Ethically, this may pose a problem because people might not want others to know details about their private lives. Depending how Target uses this information, it could potentially do so in a way that transgresses consumer and privacy laws.

The research article by Atahan and Sarkar (2011) provides a fair amount of insight into the way that companies are able to build profiles and target marketing efforts to customers in the e-commerce space. It details a method that is quite advantageous to doing so via the usage of links that, when a customer clicks on them, actually help to rapidly build a customer profile. Reading this article, one can see that companies now have a rapid and efficacious means of building customer profiles so that they can tailor marketing needs to them.