Target Suggested Maternity-Related Advertisements to a Teenage Girl's Home, Allegedly Correctly Predicting Her Pregnancy via Algorithm

June 1, 2003

Target allegedly suggested maternity-related items to a family in Atlanta, apparently forecasting their teenage daughter's pregnancy before her father did. However, the predictability of the algorithm has been questioned by critics. This incident serves as an important reminder for the need of governance and trustworthy AI practices in harm prevention, particularly when it comes to sensitive and personal data.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.651, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.650, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 3.1 — similarity 0.647, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: target
Alleged developer: target
Alleged harmed parties: target-customers

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/170

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.