
My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal - nthitz
http://time.com/83200/privacy-internet-big-data-opt-out/ 
======
jnbiche
Just to be clear, the store selling gift cards had a signed out stating that
they will report excessive number of cash transactions to the authorities
because they are forced to by FinCEN and other U.S. regulatory bodies. If a
merchant fails to report cash gift card sells over the legal limit per day,
they can be criminally prosecuted and put in jail.

So please don't blame the merchants for this. I can assure you that the
merchant doesn't care if someone wants to pay in cash. In fact, they prefer it
usually (e.g., cash discounts at gas stations).

What people see as "corporate oppression" is quite often government
oppression.

Personally, I think both corporations and multinational corporations are
engaged in this kind of misbehavior. Indeed, the line between powerful
politicians and powerful corporate leaders blurs more and more each passing
year.

If each side of the political spectrum continues to ignore the fact that both
government and large corporations are at fault here, things will never get
better.

~~~
dripton
The FinCEN threshold is $10000. The article mentioned buying enough Amazon
gift cards to buy a stroller. The most expensive stroller I could find on
Amazon in a minute was less than $600. So I don't think we can blame the
government in this particular case. Probably just a lazy clerk who didn't feel
like selling that many gift cards.

~~~
jnbiche
First, the $10,000 doesn't apply to "closed-loop" gift cards, like Visa or
MasterCard gift cards, which is likely what the OP may have been looking to
buy (although it's possible she was looking for Amazon gift cards). In the
case of closed-loop cards, the limit is $2000 a day, not $10,000.

Second, that's a 10,000 limit per day, not per purchase.

Third, as someone else indicated, no clerk said anything to the OP. She just
noticed the sign saying that large gift card purchases would be reported to
the authorities, which would make me uneasy as well (how much is "large"? to
what authorities?).

------
rayiner
I loved this bit:

> For example, seven months in, my uncle sent me a Facebook message,
> congratulating me on my pregnancy. My response was downright rude: I deleted
> the thread and unfriended him immediately. When I emailed to ask why he did
> it, he explained, “I didn’t put it on your wall.” Another family member who
> reached out on Facebook chat a few weeks later exclaimed, “I didn’t know
> that a private message wasn’t private!”

Ordinary people have _no idea_ what they're actually trading for "free"
Facebook, "free" Google, "free" Chrome, etc. Heck, I'm technologically savvy
and I don't really understand either.

~~~
Consultant32452
I'd be interested in knowing what Facebook's privacy policies are regarding
private messages. Are they data mined? Did the congrats on the baby message
result in baby related advertising?

~~~
enraged_camel
This would be an amazing way to troll your friends (or people you hate).

------
stcredzero
(Karma burning time. Summary: The only way to not swallow the Blue Pill is to
make powers that be use trusted execution made by and for the people.
Unfortunately: Not going to happen.)

 _It’s time for a frank public discussion about how to make personal
information privacy not just a series of check boxes but a basic human right,
both online and off._

The problem is, is that there is no suitable infrastructure for guaranteeing
such a right, and there is no one everyone trusts enough to implement it. To
have this in actuality, we really need some sort of trusted execution
environment. Unfortunately, this is the same thing as DRM, and we already know
how manufacturers and big software companies might collude with the
authorities to turn this against us.

In a way, this is a _win-win for totalitarianism, big-data style._ If the
powers that be can implement DRM as they want, they control computing from the
substrate-up and we've all swallowed the Blue Pill. However if the public has
a vehement reaction against DRM, then the population is effectively inoculated
against implementing such tools for themselves so they can hold authorities
and website operators to account. Either way, the oligarchs/equity lords/0.01%
win.

If you look at the activities of groups like the IRA, resistance has relied on
the power of social networks in the oppressed population. Now, online social
networks have embedded the structure of people's social networks in big data
itself. That is a lot of aggregated power. Power corrupts.

EDIT: After engaging in the discussion below, I'll bend my position a bit.
Such infrastructure would be nice (where "nice" = "really the only sane way to
do it") but a social and legal framework to set expectations might be the
pragmatic thing to go after first.

~~~
gress
This is a totally false and a distraction. We don't need a trusted execution
environment. We just need rights enshrined in law.

Rights do not have to be _guaranteed_ by bulletproof technology in order to be
valuable. We might not be able to guarantee that corporations never overstep
the bounds we set, but the threat of a lawsuit can be a powerful disincentive.

~~~
stcredzero
_This is a totally false and a distraction. We don 't need a trusted execution
environment. We just need rights enshrined in law._

From a certain POV, this is correct, and I don't disagree with the general
aim.

 _Rights do not have to be guaranteed by bulletproof technology in order to be
valuable._

Entirely correct. What's of more concern is that we not only have a general
public, but an "expert" population of programmers and other technical workers
that doesn't make decisions about these things in an informed rational way.
This is why I get on the soapbox in support of trusted execution environments
and point out how they can be used against the authorities.

 _the threat of a lawsuit can be a powerful disincentive._

But I would argue that the "trusting trust" problem encompasses not only
privacy and security, but political power as well. When transparency itself is
strictly voluntary and comes into competition with the temptation of money and
great power, we've seen that such a deterrent loses some of its potency. The
threat of a lawsuit also doesn't work as well against certain governments in
certain contexts.

You may well be right that technology is a distraction, for now. The social
and legal framework might be the thing to establish first.

~~~
gress
Sure - some kind of trusted execution environment (which I would argue we
don't understand well yet) would be an ideal solution.

But... a trusted execution environment would be no use if it wasn't mandated,
so it is secondary to having rights enshrined in law.

And yes, there is a trust problem. But I think it would be very difficult to
operate a massive data collection empire on the scale of Google or Facebook
without at least one whistleblower exposing it.

------
gress
Every time there is a debate about the intrusiveness of Google, or Facebook,
there is a chorus of people around here saying "If you don't like it, don't
use it" in defense of some kind of capitalist or libertarian ideal.

Hopefully this article helps to put the lie to that kind of thinking, and we
see this pervasive intrusion for what it is: corporate oppression; the abuse
of the corporate power over individuals.

~~~
zxcdw
Let me play devil's advocate here:

So what? Apart from an ideological view on "privacy is good mmkay", how
exactly does it hinder your life if Google knows that you are pregnant, or
that if Facebook knows that you are planning up a party for a friend? Or that
if company X knows you are anticipating movie Y?

What concrete things do I _gain_ from opting out? What do I lose? How does it
actually _affect my life_?

Edit: It's weird to receive downvotes for this as I'd assume a comment like
this _exactly_ contributes to the discussion about the topic at hand.

~~~
crazy1van
Personally, if I have to watch 3 ads on Hulu before my video, I'd rather them
be for things I might want to buy than things I will never buy.

~~~
icebraining
Why are you telling us that? It was never your choice to make. And _that 's_
the problem.

~~~
crazy1van
My point is that in this case I actually do get some value from losing
privacy.

I could just watch regular TV instead of Hulu. Those ads are just targeted
broadly by the viewership of a particular show or time-slot.

~~~
gress
This tradeoff was forced on you.

~~~
kefka
Piracy is ALWAYS an option. And piracy guarantees privacy in viewing. It
doesn't go into RedBox's DB, nor does Netflix see what I watch, and nor does
Hulu, nor even YouTube/Google. Nor will those Internet-bluray players tattle
what I've seen.

And there's no ads, ever.

And I can watch when I want, how I want.

Better yet, call it Rights-maintained Media.

~~~
aaronem
> piracy guarantees privacy in viewing

It does nothing of the sort; it only makes it less likely you'll get a
targeted ad, and more likely you'll get a nasty letter from your ISP instead.

------
fixermark
Digging through the other pieces of the story to the headline nugget, we find
this: """ But then my husband headed to our local corner store to buy enough
gift cards to afford a stroller listed on Amazon. There, a warning sign behind
the cashier informed him that the store “reserves the right to limit the daily
amount of prepaid card purchases and has an obligation to report excessive
transactions to the authorities.” """

So, it's an interesting point, And it's worth noting that we are leaning very
heavily in the direction of assuming that people who want to be anonymous are
doing so for criminal reasons. This could be partially mitigated, perhaps, if
there were a way to give cash to Amazon (but it's probably the case that large
cash transactions would be looked upon with the same scrutiny).

~~~
warfangle
It's long been a trope of dystopian (even utopian! see also: gold pressed
latinum in Star Trek) scifi that cash is relegated to the shadier
transactions, with legitimate transactions happening in the digital realm.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
That's not science fiction; it's anthropology (see: Graeber2011 ;-)). Most
societies have always seen fit to use some form of credit (or other "virtual
money") for more trustworthy transactions while employing "cold, hard cash"
for more transactions between individuals with more transient, uncaring,
insecure relations (which of course includes criminals).

The problem is that "trustworthy" has come to mean "watched over by our
corporate overlords".

------
dalke
The author of this editorial recently presented the material at the Theorizing
the Web conference. A recording and details are available at
[http://mashable.com/2014/04/26/big-data-
pregnancy/](http://mashable.com/2014/04/26/big-data-pregnancy/) . Three people
submitted that latter link to HN (see
[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=pregnant#!/story/forever/prefix/0/...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=pregnant#!/story/forever/prefix/0/%22pregnancy%20from%20big%20data%22)
) but there have been no comments.

~~~
chicagobob
In addition to Tor, I didn't see in the article, did she use Ghostery or any
other browser privacy plug-ins?

~~~
dangayle
Ghostery phones home, doesn't it?

~~~
jordigh
Ô.Ô

I thought it just checked for updates. Does it really phone home?

Damn, is it really impossible to be anonymous in today's world without
appearing to be a criminal?

~~~
zevyoura
Disconnect[0] is often touted as a more privacy conscious alternative. I
haven't investigated it thoroughly, but it's open source so you can look into
it yourself pretty easily.

[0] [https://disconnect.me](https://disconnect.me)

------
hooande
We have significantly more privacy in the modern era than people did hundreds
of years ago. Most of us live in cities large enough that no one will know
that you've been to the doctor, what you bought from the butcher or who you
spend your time hanging out with. If you think it's easy for people to find
out that someone is pregnant now, it was absolutely effortless in 1714. It's
common for people to spend days commuting to work and going out to eat and
socialize without running into anyone that they know. In the past there was
almost no privacy for anyone. People lived in a world comprised of dozens of
people and saw many of them every day.

Are we moving into a scary new era of data collection and prediction, or
cycling back to an old world where it's hard to keep secrets because everyone
knows everyone else? Big Data is no more of a threat to privacy than Small
Town used to be. But in modern society we have the option to opt out. Or at
the very least, use Tor or private browsing and avoid social media. We have
the ability to live with a level of anonymity that our ancestors would deeply
envy. The only thing stopping us is our own desire to participate in services
and online communities designed specifically to collect and broadcast
information about ourselves.

Why do we do it? Because we really like it. Our cultural roots lie in
societies where supposed secrets traveled fast and everyone knew if someone
was pregnant or gay or searching for information about strange topics. Even
when we're able to hide ourselves in crowds of strangers we invent new ways to
connect to each other and broadcast our statuses and purchase habits to as
many people as possible. Everything old is new again, and instead of trying to
hide on social media we should focus on figuring out how to take advantage of
new technology to give ourselves the level of privacy that we want. Modern
data collection presents challenges, but challenges that we can overcome to
create a world that is better than the one we came from.

~~~
equalarrow
Uh, did you read the whole article? The author's point was you can't opt out
and not seem like a criminal. This was because if you wanted to stay anonymous
online and actually buy things, you need to purchase gift cards with cash. The
place she went (or her husband did) to purchase multiple gift cards had a sign
that said something like they're watching people that buy a lot of gift cards.

You're response sounds more like a marketing brochure to me. While I love tech
and am in the tech world, the fact is, mine and everyone's private info is out
there for anyone to buy and many companies to sell. Sure, we can make tools
(some day) to put the equation in our favor, but this is not that day. Simply
saying we can use Tor/private browsing/avoid social media is only part of it.
Actually buying things not in cash leaves a trail and that info is sold to
whomever pays.

Regardless if you could easily find out in the 1700's if someone was pregnant,
the article was not a commentary on the past. It was about opting out in the
present, which is pretty much impossible if you use any kind of connected
technology in your daily life. Be it your atm/credit card, phone, internet
connection - they all leave trails.

Sure, in the 1700's a butcher would see your face and maybe remember it. Maybe
retain enough info to track you down if need be. But now, it's more than
absolute. The more everything becomes digitized, the less anyone can be
anonymous. You'd have to really be into the spy mindset to cover your tracks
and do the things that would need to be done to get false ids, etc. And I
don't know how much that would even help as machine learning and face
recognition (coupled with ccd's everywhere) get better and could probably link
up those fake ids.

Honestly, I don't care much because I'm not a very important or interesting
person. So in a sense that way, I have some anonymity. And I love tech
(still). Interesting experiment from the author, but we've already crossed the
privacy line and there's no going back or opting out.

~~~
mpyne
> The author's point was you can't opt out and not seem like a criminal.

But why is that? Let's face it, if you care _very deeply_ about INFOSEC then
you're probably someone who _actually_ has something to hide from people
(criminals, military, etc.), or someone who cares about the principle of the
matter.

If you're the latter then you'll correlate yourself with the former whether
you like it or not, and while we all agree that correlation is not causation,
it is something that might get you examined at the very least.

Remember, police can't psychically predict who among the population has
actually committed a crime or not when it happens, so they have to do "good
old fashioned police work" (as I've seen it described in NSA threads) to
investigate suspicious activity and verify it's innocuous, to determine who in
a possible set of people actually committed a given crime, etc.

By behaving in almost the same fashion as actual criminals you make it that
much harder to be discriminated _out_ of the "possibly criminal" set early in
the course of an investigation.

In this case the only thing she mentioned that seemed criminal was converting
cash to gift cards to shop anonymously on Amazon — exactly the kind of thing a
criminal would _actually_ need to do to procure materials for a crime, if they
wished.

Is this unfortunate? Absolutely! But so are many other tradeoffs society
makes, even down to waiting at a red light even when the intersection is
actually clear. If it were easy to separate criminal activity from other
activity we would hardly need police or forensics.

~~~
Riesling
I just realized that the same argument could be made regarding gun control.

> But why is that? Let's face it, if you care very deeply about GUNS then
> you're probably someone who actually has to protect from people (criminals,
> military, etc.), or someone who cares about the principle of the matter.

I think it all boils down to the amount of trust we put in our governments.
Both guns and privacy are a protective measures against corrupt governments.
In todays world privacy is probably a magnitude more important and also
associated with lesser drawbacks than guns, as it would be impossible to
organize resistance while being under todays surveillance.

~~~
mpyne
Yeah, there are a lot of parallels. But for every person who is genuinely
concerned with government overreach and that alone, I see 50 more Bundys who
use government as rhetoric to play up anti-social/selfish ends.

------
Consultant32452
I prefer to go the opposite route. When any of my close friends is having a
baby I sign up for all the baby clubs with approximately the same due date,
then hand over all the free samples and good coupons to the real expectant
parents. Some of our friends and family did this when my ex-wife and I were
having our daughter, it saved us a bundle.

------
lackbeard
This was an interesting article, but isn't the title begging the question?
Unless I missed something, no one made any criminal charges, or even raised
any suspicion regarding the author's behavior.

~~~
Zmetta
When trying to pay cash for several pre-paid cards in order to place an
anonymous online order for a stroller on Amazon, the transaction was rejected
and possibly reported to the authorities for suspicious behavior.

~~~
proexploit
> But then my husband headed to our local corner store to buy enough gift
> cards to afford a stroller listed on Amazon. There, a warning sign behind
> the cashier informed him that the store “reserves the right to limit the
> daily amount of prepaid card purchases and has an obligation to report
> excessive transactions to the authorities.”

All the article says is that there was a sign on the wall. I didn't get the
impression it stopped them.

~~~
chillingeffect
Precisely. As a diehard paranoid, I wanted to sympathize with the writer, but
I felt betrayed.

 _Nothing actually happened_. They saw a sign. So the writer gives the
impression of being an alarmist worry-wart.

Could this article have been selected for publication so as to fuel the idea
that people who are worried are merely overly anxious? The Snowden papers
proved that government organizations have been feeding us confusing
information to sway public opinion toward obedience to central authority. This
may be a good example of it.

------
junto
Rather than fear being 'outed' by her uncle on Facebook whilst pregnant, she
would have been better deactivating or 'deleting' her Facebook account. Nobody
could have tagged her or posted anything on her wall, nor sent her private
messages.

You don't dance with the devil if you intend to hide from him.

~~~
Terr_
Facebook already maintains placeholder "Ghost User Accounts" for possible
future members, so I see no reason that they wouldn't continue to track
associations with an inactive account too.

~~~
junto
Indeed, but for 9 months of pregnancy she still wouldn't have feared being
outed by her Facebook contacts.

Facebook 'delete' is in itself an oxymoron. I believe that they logically
delete everything, and then everything gets analysed and archived for
posterity.

As I was in the process of deleting my Facebook account last year I noted
several bugs that suggested that the counts of checkins and photos did not
tally with the things I had deleted. I.e. Everything.

I have some screenshots somewhere on imgur I should dig out.

------
suprgeek
I wonder if rather than focusing on completely opting out, if the author had
tried a deliberate confusion strategy in addition to minimizing her digital
footprint would she have been "more" successful? (I recognize the difficulty
in measuring "successful" outcomes with this metric).

One of the "dirty" secrets of Big data is that for the Analytics to work is
that the data has to be "prepped". How about deliberately using different
names, genders, etc etc in social media, stores (first abbreviation, maiden
name etc).

Once the data trail gets muddy enough, you cannot track anything.

Hmmm Might even be an "app" idea in this :)

~~~
pessimizer
My mother has done this her entire life, and passed the habit down to me. She
alternates between her married name (from a 35 year old divorce) and her
maiden name and both, hyphenated and unhyphenated, intentionally typos when
she can get away with it, uses a lot of off-by-1-or-2 for numbers in
registration profiles, old addresses, and alternately combines and separates
her first and middle names (because of her particular name, it works.)

She's also a data person professionally, and once worked at Acxiom. At the
time, when she checked into what they had on her, she found that Acxiom
thought she was no fewer than seven people, some of them male:)

~~~
x0x0
I find it weird that a person so concerned w/ her privacy would work for
Acxiom; did she ever mention how she squared that?

~~~
pessimizer
There's no contradiction between those two things that I'm aware of. All jobs
and all purchases under capitalism play their part in the general oppression
of the working class:)

There is the day to day disgust with how directly what you're doing enforces
the status quo - but alternatively, there aren't a lot of good (or morally
good) computer jobs in Arkansas; ask a Wal-Mart employee.

------
higherpurpose
People should be suing these companies, like in the example with Target. She
should've sued Target for that. Eventually they'll learn their lesson. Look at
Google, they're already backtracked on some privacy invasion stuff because of
some recent lawsuits.

------
slg
I am not putting a value judgement on big data, but I don't think the author's
experiment is true to her objective. Instead of testing how easy it would be
to opt out of using Facebook or Amazon, she tried to hide something from
Facebook and Amazon. She is basically trying to get the advantage of digital
life without the downsides. The experiment would have been much easier (and
closer to the normal opt out suggestions) if she quit Facebook and made her
baby purchases in person from brick and mortar stores with cash. Sure that is
an incovenience, but isn't nearly as much trouble as trying to censor your
communications with everyone online or trying to launder your baby purchases
through multiple anonymous payment methods.

~~~
gress
The 'downsides' as you put it are not inherent in the digital lifestyle.

The whole point of the article was to see whether it was possible to do this.

------
meritt
Is there a better way to purchase prepaid credit cards (perhaps with BTC,
check, cash, etc) that isn't likely to be reported?

~~~
walden42
As far as I know, gift card stores like Gyft.com don't require personal
information and you can pay with BTC. For example, in the case of the author,
she would buy a Target gift card with BTC, then check out at the register with
her smartphone.

The limit is $200 per gift card, so it's not very low for normal use. I do
this with Amazon and it's pretty easy.

~~~
vertex-four
Getting BTC without an audit trail is in the first place fairly difficult,
especially if you're not used to having to watch out for scams.

~~~
walden42
Well, being realistic, I doubt that most exchanges like Bitstamp are sharing
their customer's info with other companies, so the original issue that the
author was talking about doesn't really apply here.

If you're paranoid, you can use Local Bitcoins or the Mycelium Local Trader
app to do in person transactions.

------
ottocoder
The story about Target outing the pregnant high-schooler has circulated for
some time now, but has it ever been verified? I don't doubt Target's
capability to discover if a woman is pregnant, but the citation given [1]
sounds a bit too anecdotal (and isolated) for my taste. Are there more cases
of this happening? Any other sources?

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-
habits.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-
habits.html?pagewanted=7&_r=3&hp&adxnnlx=1398981417-ya9Av3whlYn03kadQuwzMw)

------
snorkel
She could've just done this instead:

1\. Delete Facebook account.

2\. Use cashier checks.

------
genericuser
Her experiment while interesting does not demonstrate that all of her
elaborate steps were even necessary, just that she put a ton of work into
doing this and was successful, who knows how much of that work was needed.

Also no where in her article does she reference someone else thinking she
looked like a criminal. Yes there was the sign at the store about gift cards
but nothing about the cashier caring at all. She alternates between 'look like
a criminal' and 'feel like a criminal' while I agree she might of felt like
quite a badass criminal using tor and paying for everything in cash and gift
cards, the article in no way indicates others thought she looked like a
criminal.

It does however show that she negatively views people who perform those type
of actions, since she views them as actions that make her feel like a
criminal; and, as with many people, views criminals negatively.

Also if you are going to have to go buy the gift cards to use at Amazon in the
first place? Why even shop at Amazon? Why not go to your local Babies R Us (or
wherever people buy strollers and such) and buy your items with cash there.
The convenience of Amazon seems lost on me when I have to go to a physical
store prior to ordering something on Amazon.

------
qwerta
Just for illustration, in Europe I usually carry around equivalent of $700 in
cash for petrol and other daily expenses. Less hassle and practically no risk
of being robbed. But yes, most people here prefer credit cards.

~~~
dalke
I think there's a large regional variation. That is, in Germany and
Switzerland, the small hotels I've stayed at want payment in cash, and often
don't accept credit cards. See
[http://www.thestar.com/business/2012/07/27/germanys_tough_ba...](http://www.thestar.com/business/2012/07/27/germanys_tough_bailout_stance_rooted_in_cash_only_culture.html)
for example, which describes how IKEA in Stockholm accepts credit/debit cards,
but not IKEA in Berlin, which is cash only.

In Germany one time I bought a camera at the electronics store Saturn. Again,
the store didn't take a card, though there was an ATM in the lobby so I could
draw the cash for it. This pro-cash view is also why Germany pushed for the
500 EUR bill. Apparently many people don't trust the banks, and prefer to keep
their wealth in cash.

In the UK I've found that the taxis basically don't deal with credit cards,
while in Sweden, every taxi supports it. Most Swedish banks are trying to get
away from dealing in cash.

And I spent a week in Iceland without ever having Icelandic money. Even the
local corner stores took my debit card.

------
dangayle
Fantastic story. I've been wondering if there is a truly private, easy to use
chat. Something cryptographically secure, but easy enough that I could get
other family members and friends to use it.

~~~
wlesieutre
I've read that Wickr is working on a desktop client, but it doesn't exist yet.

The lack of password recovery could be an issue for some people.

~~~
dangayle
Yeah, I had a hard enough time getting family to update their passwords after
Heartbleed.

------
trhway
so, she did have something to hide after all. One more example that the rule
is working

------
gasull
An excellent use case for Bitcoin. We need anonymous payments.

~~~
danudey
The assumption that bitcoin is anonymous isn't really a great one. It's
_pseudonymous_ at the very least, but as it's possible to track every
transaction ever made (even moreso than cash transactions), it's not a trivial
matter for typical users to anonymize their transactions.

Even if Bitcoin (and tumblers) became ubiquitous, the legal frameworks that
exist to handle cash transactions (e.g. making an unusually large amount of
cash purchases of gift cards, moving an unusually large amount of money across
the border, etc.) will be revised to include bitcoin, with the result that
using BTC in the way that people seem to think it's destined for will become,
if not illegal, then at the very least highly suspect.

Ideally, we should be fixing the broken systems that are in place, rather than
trying to concoct technology to try to work around it (which can then just be
regulated/criminalized anyway).

------
api
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwWMrDbvpzE&feature=share](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwWMrDbvpzE&feature=share)

------
Fasebook
I don't get the story that pregnant women are such a valuable demographic that
marketers would spend so much money trying to give them coupons.

~~~
pjungwir
You must not have any children. :-)

When a child comes, there are all kinds of new expenses: diapers, formula,
clothes, pediatricians, strollers, cribs, baby monitors, toys. . . .

Personally though, I'm surprised the canonical example isn't buying a new
home. I bought my first home two months ago, and it seems like every day in
the mail I get two offers for life insurance, another for lawn care, and
another for furniture/blinds. But I'm not seeing a deluge of online ads for
those things. Maybe it's an opportunity?

~~~
chiph
But this only applies for the first child, when the parents are the most
nervous about living up to expectations. By the second or third child, they're
like: "I get onesies at Goodwill and garage sales since they're cheaper and
they'll only be in it for a couple of months before the knees are worn-out, or
they've outgrown it." and "Pack-n-play? Those are expensive - I just take a
blanket along for them to play on. Takes less room in the car and easier to
clean."

~~~
Fasebook
I think it's clear that this is about gathering data, not selling anything.

------
bediger4000
Amusing occurrance of spell-checker-failure:

 _While it has a reputation for facilitating elicit activities..._

Did the author misspell "illicit" in such a way that the spell checker changed
it to "elicit", or did she write "elicit" originally? It makes a difference in
how I view this unknown-to-me-author's credibility.

~~~
deepblueocean
I noticed this, too. I think it speaks less of spell checkers and more about
Time's ability to do copy-editing.

If I submitted a piece to a major outlet such as this, I would do so in full
faith that they would assign at least one person to read through it and copy-
edit it before publication. Apparently, Time is not a sufficiently reputable
institution of journalism to believe in doing this, or at least is unwilling
to spend enough money to have it done by competent people.

EDIT: As for Janet's credibility, I can speak to it personally, having spent a
year with her working down the hall from my office. Probably the coolest stuff
she's done relates to how decisions are made in big teams of scientists (she
studied the sociology of scientists running some Mars rover missions:
[http://janet.vertesi.com/projects/social-life-
spacecraft](http://janet.vertesi.com/projects/social-life-spacecraft)).

