In 1970, a House subcommittee held hearings on the privacy consequences of advertising mailing lists and the sometimes shadowy brokers who traded in them.
In a public hearing, a Congressman weighed in on an advertiser who unwittingly let a woman’s family know she was pregnant, a database being sold with records on millions of federal employees, creepily tailor-made ads aimed at consumers based on past purchases, and a questionnaire misleadingly used to gather ad targeting data.