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.
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:
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.
I believe there are still genders, so sometimes people genderize and sometimes not, it's based on context. In this context, this article is mostly about Richard Viguerie, so I'm gonna guess they were also thinking about playing on "Mad Men" as well.
It varies by location. Most people I meet are just professionals that don't care, most people who do care are just entertained because professionals have better things to do than argue with activists.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
