In lessons learned from the Target case, what legal warnings would you give another retailer using data mining for marketing?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

If you look at this practice from a legal perspective, you would conclude that Target did not use any information that violates customer privacy; rather, they used transactional data that most every other retail chain is collecting and storing (and perhaps analyzing) about their customers. What was disturbing in this scenario was perhaps the targeted concept: pregnancy. There are certain events or concepts that should be off limits or treated extremely cautiously, such as terminal disease, divorce, and bankruptcy.