Please respond to the article, “How companies learn your secrets.”You may feel free to agree/disagree with view expressed in reading, so long as you back it up with evidence (note that you do not have to summarize the content of the article itself).In other words, react to the content and explain why you have that reaction.
In “How Companies Learn Your Secrets”, habits are considered significant in an individual’s life; thus, they may at times go unnoticed. Charles Duhigg explores the predictive analysis and elaborates on how various companies take advantage of an individual’s developed habits daily. Through the article, Charles has utilized many examples to effectively elaborate on how people think, thus ensuring the reader can recognize themselves. He effectively draws a connection between habits developed by people and how these companies utilize the habits in predictive analysis. Hence, the primary goal established through Charles’s work is to critically drive the extent of offering information to the reader to understand how companies use their knowledge and ensure that the reader decides for themselves if the impact is ethical.
In a close reading of Charles’s work, an illustration of an employee named Andrew Pole is characterized as a statistician. This is because he develops a target towards the achievement of success in predictive analysis. The utilization of Andrew Pole by the author there is a reflection of various things that are indicated by Pole that are coming through Target’s mount ad, not a person. Furthermore, Pole illustrates how Target tries to learn how consumers and their main goal is to find moments in consumers’ lives when their shopping habits are identified, not flexible, and they are easy to change. Under this aspect, Pole’s job is to collect information and offer its analysis; however, the more specific job is to figure out pregnant shoppers.
The author has developed a clear illustration of how companies effectively learn the secrets of consumers through close monitoring of their habits. I conquer with his description concerning this topic due to his exploration and provision of examples that give relevance. He further explains how one does not keep track of each item that they have ever purchased in a store; despite that, consumers are aware that there is the record kept concerning items purchased from the store. Such an illustration critically proves how companies learn the secrets of consumers. Additionally, Pole plays the role by explaining how every consumer has developed contact with the target through this perspective. This is through the process where a person hands in personal detail and all essential information that the company requires. This point raises a question about an ethical environment. However, these are the clear indication that contributes to the agreement concerning the idea presented by Charles on how companies learn our secrets.
In his work, the numerous examples given by Charles have acted as explicit support for my agreement to what he has equally elaborated in the essay. An illustration about the angry man in Minneapolis who is identified to get upset with the target over coupons is a crucial indicator of these actions done by companies. Significant reasons behind the man’s situation emerge from the target suggesting the coupons to the daughter, whereas the coupons contain the baby product. Thus, Target wants the daughter to be pregnant. However, after an apology from the company’s manager, the daughter was later pregnant as this was Target’s everyday work of identifying pregnant women. Hence this is a clear illustration that agrees with Charles’s idea on how continuously companies learn our secrets.
In conclusion, the detailed journey of Charles on how companies learn our secrets through predictive analysis, our habits and out information that the companies contain critically represents how effectively companies perform this action. Thus I agree it is not essential nor crucial for these companies to know consumer’s basic information and identities because this is the knowledge that enables the companies to learn and understand consumer secrets effectively.