Vitamin supplements, cotton buds, baby lotion, soap, wash cloths… Sounds like a pretty innocuous shopping list right?

Sure, these are the kinds of items that pretty much every woman in the world buys at some time or other, but buy them all at the same time and in the right quantities, and they become something altogether different – nothing less than a pregnancy indicator that informs your local supermarket before you even know it yourself.

This is exactly what happened to one teenage mother, after her local shopping center Target began utilizing big data for advertising purposed.

By monitoring the mum-to-be’s purchases, Target guessed that the young woman was pregnant, and even estimated her due date before bombarding her mail box with coupons for baby clothes and cribs.

Of course, the girl’s unwitting father was less than happy to discover the news in this way.

Stories like this one highlight the growing concerns among consumers about the sometimes unsettling way in which big data is used – let’s face it, having your supermarket discover your daughter is pregnant before you do is a little creepy.

But the very fact that people get upset over this kind of thing highlights something else – just how little the average consumer understands about how big data is being used by companies today.

This is slowly beginning to change, as media coverage of the subject starts to ramp up. Some interesting stories that created a stir include Big Data and the Changing Economics of Privacy, which reveals how companies can dig up an astonishing array of facts about you for the princely sum of just $2, including your age, current and previous addresses, where you were educated and even the names of your parents (and this is just the free version!).

Another recent article in the New York Times detailed the efforts made by one reporter to be able to access information held on him by the database marketing firm Acxion. Despite several requests, the reporter was rebuffed at every turn.

It isn’t just companies that are using your big data to get to know you – politicians are doing it as well.

I’ve been covering big data at SiliconANGLE extensively for several months now, yet it still surprises me how uninterested and uninformed most people are about the subject. It’s almost as if people are willingly giving up their personal information, with few concerns about who might be using it, or how they might be using it.

Times are changing though, and as more people become aware of what’s happening, we can hope that those who use big data to target us will realize and adapt to these changes.