It's not your information being connected to you directly. First your information goes into a system. That system is used to reason about how you buy things, a

It's not your information being connected to you directly. First your information goes into a system. That system is used to reason about how you buy things, and how someone similar to you buys things. This happens for every individual in the system. This eventually yields a cohesive model of behavior that can be used for probabilistic inferencing which effectively is establishing real time dynamic 'types' of both 'items being sold' and 'consumers making purchases'. Because it's so heavily generalized to a probabilistic/stochastic model, things that shouldn't get connected can get connected. You know the age old adage, correlation is not causation? That's exactly the problem with a model that is based entirely on relational linking of items with little to no oversight in ways to explain how it's actually functioning. I want to use the word self-referential because that's very much what these systems seem to be doing, it's like it literally loops in making one too many inferences about it's predictive space. I'm not saying this is precisely why it returns your choices back to you. But given that there's been some research (that I honestly haven't kept up with very much) that comes down to rigorously defining a data 'context' (for something like an RNN) and then rigorously searching the space for all data of what is a 'perfect match' for anything, all of this hyper perfect matching is bound to return you back to yourself in funny, ridiculous ways. And yes, I realize the many layers of irony for those people out there who would like to point it out. I can try to explain it and I'm making all the same mistakes it does. Trying to reason about this stuff is NOT easy because it makes your brain feel broken. And I don't build RNNs or anything like that, I've done a very small amount of research on recommendation engines when it was early days, I've taken engineering classes that study probability and stochastic processes which are used to model systems where the 'types' of variables are not always easily distinguishable from one another, but they must be organized and ordered into a system that can be reasoned about rigorously. It's like building circuits for people's minds and behaviors when they in their weakest decision making spaces (for lots of people). It's sometimes screwed up but you know, you know what you like, right haha, lol. Just blame Bezos he's the one with all the money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox