
The Junk Mail Men: Selling Your Data for over a Century (2019) - animalcule
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2019/12/the-junk-mail-men-selling-your-data-for-a-century/
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jimmaswell
The internship I was assigned in college was a local junkmail mill. I was
supposed to sign an NDA at some point but never did. Apparently they were able
to use FOIA requests targeted at localities to get a lot of information for
mail campaign targeting that all got put in a big database. Seemed a little
sketchy.

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techntoke
No need to do that when the USPS will sell it to them.

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jimmaswell
I think the FOIA's gots extra info like who got a permit to build a pool.

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dmckeon
Never thought I would feel nostalgic for old school address labels. The
current version of marketing is much more, ah, specific. If you work with data
about people, you should read Christopher Wylie's description of more powerful
technology:

[https://www.amazon.com/Mindf-Cambridge-Analytica-Break-
Ameri...](https://www.amazon.com/Mindf-Cambridge-Analytica-Break-
America/dp/1984854631)

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kevin_thibedeau
The "old school" data brokers were keeping track of menstrual cycles 20 years
ago for timed targeted ads. They were very specific about many things. The new
kids Google and Facebook didn't invent this game.

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noman-land
Mind posting some links about this? I'd be very interested in reading about
it.

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goldenkey
I think the show Mad Men mentions this, Peggy if I'm not mistaken. Lunar
cycles correlate with menstrual cycles. [1]

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3716780](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3716780)

