I'm guessing that companies are using all sorts of things, including newspaper articles, to be able to identify target markets. That doesn't bother me too much

I'm guessing that companies are using all sorts of things, including newspaper articles, to be able to identify target markets. That doesn't bother me too much; once information is online, there's very little you can do to stop people from seeing it, and making these associations seems like a logical step. That said, there are two major problems that I see here: (1) The lack of a European-style law allowing people to find out what information a company has about them. The recipient of this mail should be able to ask Office Max what information they have about him, and they should be required to provide it, as well as say from whom they got the original information. Saying that they bought the information from a third party is a cop out. (2) Some programmer, somewhere in Office Max, did an incredibly stupid JOIN, or the equivalent for whatever database they were using. I can't imagine what the possible reason was for displaying this sort of thing, and printing it out, but displaying that sort of "rationale" field is a huge no-no. In this particular case, it completely traumatized the parents, who had already gone through an awful experience. It seems incredibly obvious to me that Office Max should apologize to this family. Whatever it takes to fix this, they should do. Free merchandise for the parents seems cheesy, but perhaps establishing a scholarship in the daughter's name, or something to help grieving parents, or to prevent car accidents, would be reasonable.