It’s a meme that will never die, but there’s no proof it ever happened:
> This story doesn’t even show that Target tried to figure out whether the girl was pregnant. It just shows that she received a flyer that contained some maternity items and her weird dad freaked out and wanted to talk to the manager. There’s no way to know whether the flyer arrived as a result of some complex targeting algorithm that correctly deduced that the girl was pregnant because she bought a bunch of lotion, or whether they just happened to be having a sale on diapers that week and sent a flyer about it to all their customers.
> This story doesn’t even show that Target tried to figure out whether the girl was pregnant. It just shows that she received a flyer that contained some maternity items and her weird dad freaked out and wanted to talk to the manager. There’s no way to know whether the flyer arrived as a result of some complex targeting algorithm that correctly deduced that the girl was pregnant because she bought a bunch of lotion, or whether they just happened to be having a sale on diapers that week and sent a flyer about it to all their customers.
https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-t...