23 ms·

An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

790 points by waffle_ss 8y ago

hangonhn 8y ago
That reminded me of this speech by Jeff Bezos to Princeton: https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate-remarks https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate... “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.” It really had an impact on me.
- univalent 8y ago
  Thanks! I hadn't read that before and it was very thoughtful.
- asadlionpk 8y ago
  Video link of the same: https://youtu.be/vBmavNoChZc?t=367 https://youtu.be/vBmavNoChZc?t=367
strict9 8y ago
Experienced this with a miscarriage in our family, it's the worst. Months and months later this stuff still follows me around the web like a taunting ghost. The worst part of targeted advertising is when it becomes targeted haunting.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  I know it's not ideal, but if you go to the below URLs for Google and Facebook respectively, you can choose which categories you get ads about, and can even specifically "turn off" some categories of ads for you (it looks like facebook even allows disabling some categories for a specific period of time!) Again, it's obviously not perfect, but at the very least it can help the situation. https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/
  - strict9 8y ago
    thanks for this. People responding here with "just use an ad blocker" ... I have uBlock Origin and it's great but it only goes so far.
Perseids 8y ago
I'm someone saddened that the discussion here focuses only on what the advertiser (/ tech companies) should have done and leaves out the aspect of how we have failed to bring the obvious solution to the harmed individual: Install an adblocker at the first sign of trouble. How come she was so morally obliged to watch any ads in the first place instead of engaging in basic self defense? Or if the answer is technological: How come we accept the tyranny of advertisers on our most personal devices? Pi-Hole is a nice gimmick for those who can use it. If we can't bring the choice not to watch advertisements to the masses, we have essentially failed.
- wilg 8y ago
  You can't put an ad blocker in native phone apps, like Instagram. Sure, you can do it on the mobile website, but then you have to switch to the mobile website.
  - vortico 8y ago
    Apps that change the /etc/hosts file work great. Nearly all social media apps pull ads from separate domains, which can be easily curated into a list. Requires rooting your phone.
- curiousgal 8y ago
  Precisely. Whenever I help a friend with their computer issues I am appalled by the user experience on the internet without and ad blocker, so it's not just a matter of privacy. Asking companies to change their algorithms is quite honestly petty. And for some reason this has rubbed me the wrong way, gives out an attention seeking vibe. Just my two cents.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  I'm slowly becoming convinced adblocking is the most noble form of software development.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  > Or if the answer is technological: How come we accept the tyranny of advertisers on our most personal devices? This alone deserves a entire novel to be answered properly but in short: it reaches out to social, political and economical reasons. As I programmer I so wish the problems to be only technological but alas, they are not. 1. Most people view anything they don't understand and/or are not good at as magic that "is simply there and works this way". Most non-technical people I knew in my life -- not a small number, has to be north of 300 -- simply had no idea you could block ads. And something like the Pi-Hole they would never imagine even being possible. It'd be a spy movie tech for them. 2. Possibly controversial anecdotal observation of mine during my whole life: most normal folk are very maleable and accepting for the realities around them. Many of my peers call them "sheep" or other derogatory terms and even though on rare occasions I am pissed enough to agree with them, I still understand and realize that people have jobs and lives to deal with and they don't want to go out of their way to try and make a difference in the world. I used to be mad at that but nowadays, with me having suffered years of depression and burnout, I understand that regular folk all too well... 3. Related to the above: not many want to change society at large. As much as it boggled my mind, I actually heard a chunk of the people I met agreeing to have ads served to them. At certain point you have to wonder would you be the hero of the story that aims to bring down tech giants that harvest personal data, or the villain? I know I would view myself as the hero for sure but you gotta wonder sometimes. --- As an even more controversial aside, IMO the current breed of capitalism is ruthless and tries to fill every minute of people's leisure time with a ton of activities -- like doing taxes in huge convoluted procedures, poking you with notifications on your phone to hatch virtual eggs quicker with the diamond currency of your mobile game of choice or whatever, Facebook et al never leaving you alone about somebody posting something, and lots and lots of others. What I am trying to say is that most people I see around me are way too tired and broken to NOT accept tyranny.
res0nat0r 8y ago
I saw this post the other day, but this just seems like it is going to involve even more outrage at FB when the algorithm presents something incorrectly. Getting ads for "You just lost a child, would you like to call a helpline?" are going to outrage just as many people, which is why I expect they just stay away from that type of subject matter all together.
- floatingatoll 8y ago
  It wouldn’t outrage people who need the help.
- thebiglebrewski 8y ago
  How about just stopping the pregnancy ads? Why does it suddenly have to be serving ads about stillbirth?! Maybe just go back to serving pre-pregnancy ads, or ads about something else....or maybe just no ads at all, for a welcome respite?
- ssully 8y ago
  I think they are asking to stop being prodded with baby ads altogether, not to be shown ads for loss support hotlines.
- skystrife 8y ago
  The correct response is not to try to advertise targeting the traumatic event, but to pivot and avoid it and related subjects entirely. I doubt people will complain if ads about babies and parenting were to disappear after a still birth or miscarriage.
  - basic1 8y ago
    >The correct response is not to try to advertise... Never going to happen, they say marketers ruin everything for a reason.
    - skystrife 8y ago
      I'm not saying "don't advertise at all", but rather "advertise something very different". Does that matter, though? Maybe not.
creaghpatr 8y ago
Suprised pregnancy doesn’t fall within the ‘no targeting based on health conditions’ policy of most ad platforms.
- max76 8y ago
  It's way to lucrative of a market to ignore.
- mike_n 8y ago
  from a marketer's perspective, it's one of the most lucrative life events, along with weddings and buying a house and falling ill -- huge amounts of money being spent on goods and services and new behaviors.
  - gnu8 8y ago
    My life is my life, not a revenue stream for these parasites to capture. Adblocking isn’t good enough. There needs to be a way to punish these people and cost them money.
    - jonathankoren 8y ago
      Maybe I’m singing, “Don’t Ban The Bomb”[0], but algorithmic advertising literally pays the mortgage and puts food on my table. You can live your life just fine. No one is interfering with it. No more than getting a flier in the mail asking if you want to drive for Uber is a big disruption. In fact, enough people find some level advertising useful, and have for literally hundreds of years. [0] https://youtu.be/lSEtCz61O_8 https://youtu.be/lSEtCz61O_8
      - eertami 8y ago
        Useful to whom, the companies employing predatory behaviour and psychological tricks to convince people to buy things they do not need? There's no nice way to put this but the world would not be at all affected or a worse place if your company ceased to exist tomorrow. In fact you could argue many would be better off. I struggle to believe competant software developers can argue "oh but I didn't have a choice". You chose to join this company to put food on your table. There are many ethically good industries you could also work in to do so. Maybe you'd earn slightly less, but you could have a clean conscience.
joe_hills 8y ago
On an emotional level, this deeply troubles me—but to address the problem analytically: It strikes me that an ad algorithm that forces grieving people to opt out of social media at a time when their friends and family are most interested in checking in on their well-being may encourage a broader pattern of falling back on non-ad-supported communication channels in the weeks or months to come. It seems like there's a strong case to be made here that some ad-supported communication channels should consider either an ad-free grief mode when users are in distress, or at least sell a giftable ability to use the site without ads, in which case friends of the grieving could chip in to avoid this kind of distress.
- whymauri 8y ago
  I totally see what you mean, but the concept of gifting temporary "ad-free" internet media to grieving people feels dystopian to me.
  - joe_hills 8y ago
    I'd prefer the systems avoided showing users upsetting ads for free, I'm just not sure how that system would work or how to prevent users from gaming it.
- skystrife 8y ago
  Interesting idea, but I'm bothered by the idea that social media platforms would be effectively monetizing grief in this solution. This sort of thing, to me, points at the deficiencies of appealing to purely statistical patterns without any guard rails placed on top. After all, statistically, the most likely relevant categories after "pre-natal" are going to be surrounding children who _were_ born safely. So if you appeal just to data alone, you won't likely solve this problem because it is relatively rare. The biggest failure, to me, is the response of the system when the user goes out of her way to say that the "pre-natal" ads are not relevant. Statistically it assumes successful birth, but that doesn't reflect her actual intent. A simple dialog tree would maybe suffice: "not relevant" -> "this specific thing is irrelevant" vs "suppress this and all related content". One signal says maybe don't show that particular brand again, and the other says to pivot the relevance model significantly away from that topical section of the ad space entirely.
dreamdu5t 8y ago
Oh God... the horror... the inhumanity... of seeing ads! How outrageous !
- sctb 8y ago
  We asked you many times to comment civilly but it's not happening so we've banned the account.
dannykwells 8y ago
I think it's things like this that will ultimately bring the downfall of the tech giants - the fact that even with "machine learning", the quality if the experience is still so low. They built an addictive product in the beginning, but now all of them are starting to make us feel nauseous, which is one of the fastest ways to break an addiction. It's true here for social media (in spades), but it's true with Amazon (sorting through all the junky products, never knowing if something is genuine), Netflix (all the junky content, barely curated), and many of the others as well. I think ultimately we will (re) learn that constant naive appeals to the lowest common denominator, while a fast way to make a buck, might not be the best long-term strategy.
- pedrocr 8y ago
  > I think ultimately we will (re) learn that constant naive appeals to the lowest common denominator, while a fast way to make a buck, might not be the best long-term strategy. That's the best case. The worst case is we've broken our attention spans and ability to interact without heavily optimized feel-good hits and get to keep both pieces. At least in politics we seem to have gone quite far down that path and I don't yet see a way out of re-learning proper discussion methods. Bright ideas are definitely needed here.
- buboard 8y ago
  Facebook in particular can easily fix this. Just use their friends to get the information.
- colmvp 8y ago
  I remain skeptical that it'll make a dent, honestly. People will still use Twitter, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc. because they provide enough convenience and positive experiences that outweigh the perceived negatives. I mean people know about the negatives of companies that use sweat shops, child labour, or who employ people in horrific working conditions, and yet these corporations are still very much the giants in their field. You have companies who source ingredients from companies that don't have great living conditions for livestock, and they're still in business. The tech giants will remain tech giants because as much as people will complain about it, they won't abstain. They won't stop using their phones, their websites, their apps, their search engines, their e-mail... because it's all too hard to give up.
40acres 8y ago
I've been really interested in a 'digital agent' model for a while now. Some profile, and/or grand set of settings that apply to all my interactions online. I interface with way too many platforms online to keep track of, this can lead to unwanted and annoying targeting similar to (but obviously on a much lesser scale) to this mother. I recently bought a shaving kit for my future brother-in-law for Christmas, I looked up some reviews on Google and Youtube and now every Youtube video and ad is regarding this particular shaving product. This product is now following me on the web, if I were able to simply tell my 'digital agent' "hey, I'm not interested in shaving products anymore" and have my agent then broadcast this message to Youtube, Instagram, etc. I think that'd be helpful.
- walrus01 8y ago
  I recently viewed the Amazon page for a 55 gallon drum of personal lubricant and you would not believe the weird ads I get now.
  - darkr 8y ago
    Personalised recommendations can be a very slippery problem to solve.
- jbob2000 8y ago
  Or we could all just start googling and searching for things that are completely irrelevant to us. This would fuck up the advertising models and marketers would be forced to change their practices. So I say to you all: go and google some random shit and do some deep dives into it. Be predictably unpredictable.
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    I run a comment reply bot on my reddit account on saturday afternoons/nights when I'm out. It just posts some highly-voted comment from a CSV. My reddit history makes no freaking sense.
  - just_one_time_ 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
srvo 8y ago
This seems to happen a lot when one's experience is statistically unlikely, or when it doesn't neatly mesh with a commercial opportunity. For instance, I am a transgender woman and I get THE WEIRDEST ads. Makes sense, since an algorithm meshing together my engagement histories from ten years of social platforms must see something quite strange. The only appropriately targeted advertisements I get are from academics interested in studying me. Like: "are you a trans woman? Take this study and win a gift card." When platforms attempt to monetize me, they wind up pushing the brooks brothers dress shirt deals and so on that I used to gobble up in my prior life. I've taken my business local as a result, but the algorithmic rejection of my reality on these platforms takes a pretty consistent toll. I don't know what the solution is, but wanted to underscore that this is a broader problem.
- 40acres 8y ago
  Very interesting perspective. I think stories like yours are why I believe in the ideas behind the diversity effort going on in tech right now. As a black male I've definitely interacted with these platforms and just have been puzzled by the outcomes. On the other hand I wonder, would you be okay with these ad networks being able to identify you as transgender? And then tailoring ads towards you? I'm sure there are things that are still interesting to you post-transition.
- cronix 8y ago
  I am coming to the conclusion that the only way to beat the system is to not play in the system. Or play as little as possible. I no longer go on FB, Instagram or Amazon. I do my best to just be anonymous. I don't "need" to hang out on social media. I lived quite happily before these services even existed, and will continue without them. We have control. We can resist their shiny toys. If we are waiting for THEM (or politicians) to fix these problems, we will die of old age waiting. It's antithetical to their business and self-interests. The only way to make them less powerful is to not give them your data. That is the source of their power. Information. Greetings Professor Falken Hello A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. (1983 - Wargames)
  - paulie_a 8y ago
johnny_and1 8y ago
I feel like this is similar with Facebook "making it rain" whenever you send money through their messenger. It does not matter why you send the money, they always celebrate. Very distasteful and not taking into consideration the real reason. They presented this feature at MobileHCI'17 as part of their "Delight" mantra. They don't care about 100% accuracy, as long as it works for the majority, they will not cater to the minority.
- misterprime 8y ago
  "I got raped in college and need cash for an abortion". Sends money. YAAY!
GuiA 8y ago
Banksy on advertising, in 2004: People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs. The problem is that you can't graffiti or tear down a digital ad. Activism is nigh impossible in digital walled gardens.
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  You can do better and just install an ad blocker though. Activism against ads in public space is still a very much IRL activity.
- random878 8y ago
  >People are taking the piss out of you everyday. >in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. >what they like wherever they like with total impunity. >Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy >They never asked for your permission Sums up vandals like Banksy pretty well too.
- jrockway 8y ago
  I don't really see the difference between Banksy having himself plastered all over the media for shredding his artwork versus Colgate telling me to buy their toothpaste. Banksy understands and uses advertising better than anyone.
sixstringtheory 8y ago
Sounds a lot like “A friend of mine died and I didn’t know because of algorithms” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956811
politician 8y ago
I'm coming around to the idea that personalized ads should be classified along with biological weapons. The latter attacks your biology while the former attacks your mind. Consider the story about Russia hacking the 2016 elections through the use of a massive campaign of personalized ads on Facebook and Google to polarize communities through misinformation sites tailored to their personal biases. Whether you believe the Russia story or not, this set of actions would as surely constitute an attack on a civilian population as a deployment of a bioweapon tailored to cause mental confusion and delirium. Yet due to a blind spot and the daily delivery of these weapons on behalf of the major personalized ad aggregators, we do not recognize the severity of what's going on. Long-term elevated levels of stress hormones do real physical damage. Can you imagine if the survivors of Nagasaki were to react to the nuclear destruction of their city with the same careless indifference that we have towards the continuous attempts to reprogram our very minds?
alexchamberlain 8y ago
This is why we need Ethics Boards in software engineering.
benj111 8y ago
It always amazes me how stupid these company's algos are sometimes. Amazon tells me I've had an account with them for over a decade. It knows I've bought 2 kettles from them. When does it start serving ads for kettles? Just after I've bought one. On the other hand I'm not sure most people would want facebook wt al 'knowing' they've just lost their child, so other than getting rid of targetted ads, I'm not sure what other solution is best.
- ryanlol 8y ago
  >It always amazes me how stupid these company's algos are sometimes. If they're so stupid, why are they making so much money? Is an algo with a positive RoI really stupid?
  - benj111 8y ago
    They are making money despite their algos. Amazon just suggests things I've looked at regardless of whether I've bought it. I hopefully won't be buying a new kettle for a few years, so its just wasted. Why don't they try upselling me related things instead of spamming me? Their algo has been suggesting things for over 10 years, based on over 10 years of buying data. I've clicked on zero of their ads or emails.
shpx 8y ago
She could install an ad blocker.
sigi45 8y ago
I really really think it is unethical to generate a video from my stream to show me my last year or whatsoever. Why? Fuck you why.do you really think I wanna feel good thanks to a standard algorithm which some software team wrote to engage me more? No. And yes it's fucking obvious to me how it works but it's not obvious to enough other people.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nappy-doo 8y ago
Protip: No, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram didn't see you Googling anything.
- pmlnr 8y ago
  Riiiiight. Because none of these companies sell/buy data from eachother.
  - ryanlol 8y ago
    Google certainly does not sell your search queries to twifacegram, that'd just be silly. If you have any evidence to the contrary, I would absolutely love to see it.
jakobegger 8y ago
Does anybody ever see relevant ads? I guess retargeting kinda works, if I look for info about mortages I see lots of ads from banks, but for anything else? We're all human, we're amazingly complex, everyone of us is unique, and nobody likes to be put in a drawer. But then you have the smartest programmers in the world, working for the richest companies in the world, and all they come up with is "if someone googles for baby show them ads for nappies"? It's remarkable how stupid these "smart" algorithms are, and I think the problem is a based on a simple fallacy: Everyone thinks of themselves as sophisticated, but believes others are simpletons. I'm not sure where to go from here.
- soundwave106 8y ago
  Based on a comment wesd linked to above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18535748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18535748), and applying that comment to all the large corporations behind ad-tech (because IMHO large corporate political problems are fairly similar no matter where you go)... It seems like for these systems, there are often multiple teams developing the algorithms, with multiple algorithms in play behind the recommendation. Each algorithm has their own style of metrics system. Some of them are probably relatively simple with not very sophisticated AI/ML (or even no AI/ML at all) behind it. And, there is a lot of internal political conflict preventing better analysis of said algorithms to refine them. In other words, you're absolutely right.
- ryanlol 8y ago
  >Does anybody ever see relevant ads? Are you serious? Does anyone ever make sales from advertising? Yes they do, even without retargeting.
- mynameishere 8y ago
  They are astonishingly terrible. I'm especially amazed by the spam sent straight from amazon. Like...high-end fashion. Huh? Maybe I bought a pair of men's socks and they think I want pricey handbags? Or...ads for books I've already purchased. Like, umm... They have almost two decades of my buying habits and that's the best they can do?
viburnum 8y ago
Let's just ban ad tech.
Rudism 8y ago
An error in the inverse direction, if these sites were to add dead-child-detecting algorithms, would be far worse in my opinion. Imagine you're a mother who stops posting for a while because you're staying in the hospital with your newborn who is unwell but still alive. You decide to post a long-overdue update to friends and family on Instagram or whatever and are suddenly served ads for child coffins and funeral services. Definitely the worse of two evils in this case.
hulton 8y ago
Is this Gillian person trolling or just extremely shallow?
paulddraper 8y ago
Twitter confuses me. There is a character limit on text, so its users post images of text? I know this is off-topic; it just seems an absolutely byzantine method of communication. Reminds me of sending a YouTube video with Word. https://xkcd.com/763/ https://xkcd.com/763/
dkrich 8y ago
I feel like I’m alone in asking this but does personal responsibility play no part in this? She starts by admitting that she voluntarily signaled to these platforms that she was pregnant. They are ad platforms. She then goes on to admit that she continued to go back on the platforms after and then blames them for showing ads she herself engaged with at one point! I don’t think anyone would ever wish someone grieving to be reminded of the source of the grief or say “too bad.” But I think a reasonable person could conclude this is a little unreasonable.
- japhyr 8y ago
  I didn't read that as she "voluntarily signaled to these platforms that she was pregnant". She made social media posts with many clear signals that she was pregnant. She basically said, "I know your algorithms can detect that I was pregnant. Can't your algorithms detect that my baby is no longer alive?" That seems like a pretty fair statement.
  - dkrich 8y ago
    So now society is frustrated because it’s data isn’t being analyzed and used to serve ads effectively enough? We’ve officially come full circle. How about this- if you are uncomfortable with the prospect of ads potentially shown to you that may upset you based on recent history that’s now changed, lay off the platform for a while.
    - AndrewUnmuted 8y ago
      This is precisely the hazardous morality we begin to enter when we become as passively engaged as social media allows. The platform becomes an antidote to sadness; social media has reached a place in society where it's casually being used as a means for self-medication. People who are on social media appear to be deluding themselves into believing that social media can offer some sort of support and minimize the pain, but this is probably the biggest misconception about which we can convince the public otherwise.
  - ryanlol 8y ago
gammateam 8y ago
This is the black mirror episode
crazygringo 8y ago
I don't mind the ads... I just wish we could manually update our inferred advertising profiles ourselves! Like, "I already bought that product on Amazon so you don't need to advertise it to me anymore." Like, "I already shop at store X so you don't need to keep showing it." Or the obvious case in this article. Sure, draw your inferences... but please let us correct them! If I'm gonna see ads, I want them to be relevant.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  You are assuming they optimize for a singular sale which we all know is not true. They want you to buy all the time.
- justapassenger 8y ago
  https://www.facebook.com/help/247395082112892?helpref=related https://www.facebook.com/help/247395082112892?helpref=relate... https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662856 https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662856
  - crazygringo 8y ago
    Fascinating! Thanks, I'd never heard of this.
NorthOf33rd 8y ago
Instagram is not a person. Don't ask it to be decent. Those ads are not your friends. Don't expect them to treat you like they care. You're not sharing your information with a human. You're sharing it with a business who is tuned to maximize profit. The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative. They don't care about you. You've made the decision to let a business deep into your personal life, a space once reserved only for loved ones. These are the consequences.
- Riseed 8y ago
  > Those ads are not your friends. Don't expect them to treat you like they care. > You're not sharing your information with a human. You're sharing it with a business who is tuned to maximize profit. The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative. Considering only the profit aspect (because the ethics, social responsibility, and public opinion aspects have already been addressed elsewhere in this thread and on twitter): Surely it's a better ROI to have a user than to lose a user. Hence, it makes more sense for e.g. "stillborn" be a trigger word that stops/blocks pregnancy-related ads for X time than for the user to be so brokenhearted by the platform itself that they leave. Surely it's a better ROI to show relevant ads than offending ads. Hence, it makes more sense to show e-counseling ads to grieving eyes than to show them tragedy-reminder ads. Honestly, this seems like a no-brainer from any perspective.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > Hence, it makes more sense for e.g. "stillborn" be a trigger word that stops/blocks pregnancy-related ads for X time than for the user to be so brokenhearted by the platform itself that they leave. Only iff you can be confident that the occurrence of this trigger word means that a person indeed experienced stillbirth, and wasn't just researching this, reading up on it because of fear, a non-native speaker looking up the definition of the word, etc. Metrics like this are really only weakly correlated with what (you'd think) they're trying to determine. Even targeted advertising is essentially a shotgun approach, as we don't even know what actually makes a person click on an ad. Also: as long as (probability of losing an user X their expected lifetime value) is lower than (probability of ad hitting a gullible person X money got from the ad), it's more profitable to just display the ad. People all over the thread seem to think that it's only about losing vs. not losing a user. But there's opportunity cost to not losing a user, and frequently it's judged not worth it. (It's good the author is raising a stink over this, it shifts the ROI calculations a little bit towards being more humane.)
bearcobra 8y ago
I'm genuinely curious what the reaction would be with non-programatic ads that presented similar content. Would it be just as painful if you were watching TV and got an ad for Huggies, or is it because we know the ads are personalized?
monksy 8y ago
While her situation is tragic, She's demonstrating a huge amount of entitlement and technically illiteracy. She's making assumptions that all of these studies from data science and usage of recommendation/personalization systems are for her benefit. They're not, she's not paying the bills on that. That's for someone to sell her something. She's entitled because she believes that her unusual/rare situation should be accounted for and encoded in their global system. Ok, I think I probably burned off a bit too much of the hn points there.. Now to get on my soapbox. Reporters like this are exactly why no one understands or cares about privacy. If we're to have an honest disussion about this, the crux of the issue is: Should we have control over the data and interactions we perform. (the US doesn't have a GDPR) The other thing that should be pointed out heavily: Most of the tech industry, in the last 10 years, has been solely focused on targeting the majority of people in profit grabs. This is an example of such of a focus.
- danso 8y ago
  Not everyone is as enlightened about data science as you seem to be. If you actually want GDPR-like reform in the U.S., then part of the discussion involves people pointing out the absurdities and injustice in how data science is currently implemented. Imagine your line of condescending argument being applied to someone complaining about being wrongly convicted and incarcerated, and who is calling for criminal justice reform. "You're entitled because you believe that your unusual/rare situation should be accounted for and encoded in the overall justice system" edit: and the author even points out how she has done the manual work to give feedback to the algorithm: > And when we millions of brokenhearted people helpfully click “I don’t want to see this ad,” and even answer your “Why?” with the cruel-but-true “It’s not relevant to me,” do you know what your algorithm decides, Tech Companies? It decides you’ve given birth, assumes a happy result, and deluges you with ads for the best nursing bras... You read this, and yet still saw fit to berate the author for being "entitled". And then, one sentence later, go on to proclaim about how the "crux of the issue is: should we have control over the data and interactions we perform"? How does that work exactly?
  - monksy 8y ago
    As technical people: We generally understand that data science works in the following manner: 1. You collect and annotate data (This is probably about 90% of the work here) 2. Someone has a goal of something to find or query 3. Develop models that can solve that goal, or redefine 4. Use the output For the results of data science, you are always going to get generalized approximations of segments (groups of people) That's just how statistics work. (It's also how medicine tends to work as well.. but I digress) > Criminal justifce reform The consequences from are a lot higher. We've seen this over 1000+ years about some of the conerning court cases. That's why we have ideas such as "spirit of the law," human judges, juries, and appeals. Additionally, this is why the law is so complicated and murky. Computers are very bad at this. I'm especially hard on this individual because she's using her position with WaPO to try to publically "humiliate" those tech companies. > Giving feedback This is where some of the techincal literacy comes in a well, she doesn't seem to understand that the feedback requires human understanding is not something that is "intelligently" accounted for. Systems like that do not exist. The ad platform isn't something that is designed to accomidate her needs. (which is why I used the word entitled) It's a bit like being upset over those same ads being shown on TV. (media literacy covers, those are ads they may or may not be targeted towards you and those do not have to reflect your reality) --- As far as the data privacy bit goes: We should have control over the data that is collected about us and have the ability to remove it later. At the moment the strongest thing we have is the GDPR, but that's for European Union citizens only.
nyxxie 8y ago
I felt immense pity for the mother in this scenario, and after reading the article I agreed that FB aught to have some sort of way to indicate that such advertisements are offensive and should not be shown to the user. Ideally, I'd like to see a paid tier that gets rid of advertising altogether. Then I read some of the comments here and on other sites. To put it bluntly, I don't understand the tone of entitlement people have when they demand FB/Twitter/etc fix their individual problems. I mean, I obviously understand it - such services are very popular and play a big part of peoples' social circles and lives. What I don't understand is why they think they have a right to demand that a platform they aren't even paying for should cater to them. If everyone who disagreed with Facebook's revenue model were to leave Facebook, another platform would inevitably pop up that would cater to that new market niche. This seems to be the most fair solution to all parties, but instead it seems like people demand that someone compel FB to change based on their wants. I disagree with this not onlt because it's immoral and unfair, but also because it just means that those future FB competitors will have all sorts of obscure and unique regulatory hoops to jump through. Am I the only one who thinks this way?
- jeremy7600 8y ago
  No, I felt the same way. The platforms are just doing what they are programmed to do, its not meant to be offensive. The fact that it is offensive is not something a computer could detect, exactly, so in my mind the platforms have done nothing wrong.
  - KingMob 8y ago
    But at the end of the day, humans are still in charge, not algorithms. If they can't adequately control the algorithms, perhaps they're not ready to be deployed. To see this a little more clearly, if a military deployed autonomous killer robots that kept accidentally killing civilian children, would you then argue the military isn't responsible?
    - jeremy7600 8y ago
      false equivalency, no thank you.
woolvalley 8y ago
What she is asking will probably be even more creepy. Currently these platforms are basically associating words to your user, which advertisers then select from a pull down. Past some specialized categories created out of advertiser demand - such as political leaning, location, age and gender - there isn't much reasoning behind it. First her user id got the pregnancy keywords associated, now she also has sad / still born words associated. The system isn't smart enough to reason that the two tags should be mutually exclusive in a culturally sensitive way, just like it doesn't with millions of other pairs around the world within 100s of other cultures & languages around the world. But if it was, then how much worse could it get in other ways?
- danso 8y ago
  The author describes manually removing herself from being targeted, e.g. clicking "I don't want to see this ad" and "It's not relevant to me". Are we supposed to be content with platforms that are unable to incorporate such manual feedback? I mean, we (the average user on HN) get pretty irate when software ignores or reverts config options we've previously set. I don't see how this is much different.
gwbas1c 8y ago
I never shared anything about our pregnancies on Facebook until the babies came. Anyway, it's stories like this that make me want to share even less personal information. It also shows that we've gotten far too carried away with marketing.
jlpicard 8y ago
Banner ads are fine. Im happy to visit a site that has the odd banner ad, hell even 1 or 2 ads in the side are fine too. Its the tracking that bugs the shit out of me. Tracking and pop ups. I'd use Facebook|Insta|Twitter more if it did less tracking, showed a couple of ads, allowed me to have a TIMELINE over a NEWSFEED and suggested maybe a few popular news stories from reputable news sources. If I want news stories from Daily Wire, I'll subscribe. If I want BBC, I'll subscribe. I get it, it'll make less money from less targeted ads - but it'll probably feel less ethically bankrupt. Or maybe im just a mad man. If Amazon ads were a bit smarter ( like yeah, I JUST purchased 12 cans of Monster - I dont need another fucking ad ) I'd be less annoyed at the ads.
michaeleisel 8y ago
Interesting story, not sure if it's very actionable.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
SergeAx 8y ago
I've never been in such a terrible situation, and I hope I never will, but. Modern online ads are so annoying I can't help but making serious effort to eliminate it from my online life. Adblockers, filtering proxies and so on. I believe that's the only way to deal with this monstrosity in a short perspective.
rargramble 8y ago
Maybe don't share your whole fuckin life on social media
IronWolve 8y ago
Early days on Facebook kept trying to get me to add my ex as a friend, they didnt understand "block" very well.
jerrac 8y ago
This might have already been said, but whatever happened to ads based on the content of the page you are on? If I'm reading an article about manufactured homes, an ad linking to a manufactured home seller could be actually useful. Granted, I haven't turned of my ad blocker in a very long time, so maybe they still exist?
mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
Please change the headline to "Dumbfuck journalist reveals self to be dumbfuck." Facebook doesn't know you searched for information about stillbirths because Facebook isn't Google. How fundamentally unintelligent do you have to be to not understand this? I'd be shocked if her IQ was above 90.
sabujp 8y ago
adblock, ublock, zap every fucking ad
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nvr219 8y ago
Another great reason to install ublock origin, privacy badger, and to put facebook and the gang in different browser instance / container
d--b 8y ago
Tough story... What’s interesting in the post is that the author is not mad at ads in the first place, she’s angry at the failure of the algorithm to adapt to her situation. So this is something that companies could fix. Like when they infer something about your state, they could ask you about it, and have a setting “on and off” ads. Like: “hi, our algo tells us you may be pregnant, are interested in seeing ads for these kinds of stuff or not”? And that could be a setting you could remove. Maybe it’ll spook some users off... In any case there should be a button “stop trying to infer shit about me”. Perhaps it’d be a good way to introduce pay $5 a month for total privacy Facebook.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
camillomiller 8y ago
Two years ago my relationship of 11 years came to an end. While I was going through a very painful breakup, Facebook would constantly inundate me with “memories” full of fake algorithmically tuned enthusiasm. My ex was constantly part of that. Understandably, so. I just wonder what it would be for someone that has actually lost a child or a dear one. Yes, I know I can deactivate the relationship status and choose not to see that person anymore, but that won’t work with memories that don’t have that person tagged in, but will still depict something that you’ve still done together in the past, like the picture from a trip, a piece of furniture you built together, or a pic of her amazing cat (who also tragically died years ago).
remilouf 8y ago
My wife and I went through something similar a little less than a year ago (baby die at 6 months from a heart failure). Every now and then I still get the occasional diaper ad popping up. What disturbs me the most are colleagues who said it was my fault since I hadn’t shared my grief on social media, and algorithms could not learn (I work in data « science »). As if targeted advertising was a law of Nature and there was nothing we could do about it. Just deal with it. And blame yourself for not showcasing your pain in front of hundreds of people. The issue with algorithms is not that these events are statistically unlikely (unfortunately). They just have memory, enough memory to be accurate. So the day happy messages are replaced with the word « death », it hasn’t had the time to learn baby was not there anymore. There may be ways to improve that, but I bet you’d be trading accuracy for the remaining 95% people. Guess what version wins at a business meeting? I’m not blaming colleagues who write these algorithms. They didn’t know this could happen, they didn’t think about it before this happened to me. We’re all math and CS geeks priding ourselves in [insert your metric here] score above the 90% mark, and that’s all we optimize for. I’ve heard a joke once that the difference between science majors and humanities major was that scientists build the atomic bomb, humanities major explain to them why it’s not a good idea to use it. Targeted advertising is not as bad as the atomic bomb, of course, but you get the idea.
vasco 8y ago
Not as dramatic and much simpler to fix, yet still broken: Search for one-time things (say a new phone) on amazon. Purchase said things. Continue getting ads for new phones for weeks. Surely they must realize that after you purchase a phone re-targetting will only be effective at least a year+ later.
smsm42 8y ago
I am surprised how many comments here complain about things that would not be a problem if one used adblocker. I mean, I have no problem with people wanting to see ads, but I don't really understand - why? I can count on my fingers how many times I saw an ad that was genuinely useful for me - and I probably could keep typing while I'm counting. But if I use a device without an adblocker, they start to annoy me in minutes, and sometimes just make browsing completely useless. Of course, it's hard to get rid of 100% of ads, but it's not complicated to get rid of about 90%.
syrrim 8y ago
"Ads were my best friends - until they weren't" I used to love ads. Every time I saw a new ad show up, I'd get a little bit excited, knowing that it would be my friend for the next few month or years. When I saw an old familiar ad, I made sure to greet it, so that it doesn't get lonely. I took it as part of my social responsibility - the same as picking up after my dog - to buy products when I'd seen enough ads for them. That's not to say all ads were good - sometimes, I would see an ad for something that I didn't like. But this was always a cause for reflection - had I forgotten to tell the machine about some private detail of my life, the knowledge of which it could have targeted me better? On those occasions, I would make a promise to feed it more data, to make sure it was more able to help me. Then, I would dutifully mark the ad "I don't want to see this ad", to inform it of it's mistake. The machine would always learn quickly, and go back to showing me happy, friendly ads. I would be extra careful to buy those products, to make sure the mahcine knew it was doing a good job. But. There came a time when the machine started making mistakes, and wouldn't stop. I had realized that only two people - me and my husband - simply couldn't buy that many things, and we needed more mouths as tributes to the machine. I had entered a new stage in my life, and was already buying more products than I ever had before. And the machine was cooperative, helpful, bringing me new friends every day. And that would have continued being the case, as my child grew the machine would have helped it select its' college. But it never grew up. Because it was never born. Because it was stillborn. And the machine didn't learn. And when I told it I wanted ads for antidepressants and cabbage, it didn't listen. It kept on showing me ads for products for a baby that I would never have. And I could follow, as the years passed, each stage of my unborn babies life, as the machine desperately tried to target ads at it. What once were my friends have become my worst nightmare. What once was my partner in better supporting my consumerism, became my tormentor. What once was a happy member of society became a broken shell. It could happen to you too. Also: >there are 26000 stillbirths in the US every year >when we millions of broken-hearted thought that would slip by me if you broke it over two pictures, did you?
leavjenn 8y ago
And now she starts getting adoption ads: https://twitter.com/gbrockell/status/1072992972701138945 https://twitter.com/gbrockell/status/1072992972701138945 . "We're sorry your baby passed away, how about get a new one from here?" That's sick.

790 points by waffle_ss 8y ago

That reminded me of this speech by Jeff Bezos to Princeton: https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate-remarks https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate... “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.” It really had an impact on me.

univalent 8y ago
Thanks! I hadn't read that before and it was very thoughtful.
asadlionpk 8y ago
Video link of the same: https://youtu.be/vBmavNoChZc?t=367 https://youtu.be/vBmavNoChZc?t=367

strict9 8y ago

Experienced this with a miscarriage in our family, it's the worst. Months and months later this stuff still follows me around the web like a taunting ghost. The worst part of targeted advertising is when it becomes targeted haunting.

Klathmon 8y ago
I know it's not ideal, but if you go to the below URLs for Google and Facebook respectively, you can choose which categories you get ads about, and can even specifically "turn off" some categories of ads for you (it looks like facebook even allows disabling some categories for a specific period of time!) Again, it's obviously not perfect, but at the very least it can help the situation. https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/
- strict9 8y ago
  thanks for this. People responding here with "just use an ad blocker" ... I have uBlock Origin and it's great but it only goes so far.

Perseids 8y ago

I'm someone saddened that the discussion here focuses only on what the advertiser (/ tech companies) should have done and leaves out the aspect of how we have failed to bring the obvious solution to the harmed individual: Install an adblocker at the first sign of trouble. How come she was so morally obliged to watch any ads in the first place instead of engaging in basic self defense? Or if the answer is technological: How come we accept the tyranny of advertisers on our most personal devices? Pi-Hole is a nice gimmick for those who can use it. If we can't bring the choice not to watch advertisements to the masses, we have essentially failed.

wilg 8y ago
You can't put an ad blocker in native phone apps, like Instagram. Sure, you can do it on the mobile website, but then you have to switch to the mobile website.
- vortico 8y ago
  Apps that change the /etc/hosts file work great. Nearly all social media apps pull ads from separate domains, which can be easily curated into a list. Requires rooting your phone.
curiousgal 8y ago
Precisely. Whenever I help a friend with their computer issues I am appalled by the user experience on the internet without and ad blocker, so it's not just a matter of privacy. Asking companies to change their algorithms is quite honestly petty. And for some reason this has rubbed me the wrong way, gives out an attention seeking vibe. Just my two cents.
PascLeRasc 8y ago
I'm slowly becoming convinced adblocking is the most noble form of software development.
pdimitar 8y ago
> Or if the answer is technological: How come we accept the tyranny of advertisers on our most personal devices? This alone deserves a entire novel to be answered properly but in short: it reaches out to social, political and economical reasons. As I programmer I so wish the problems to be only technological but alas, they are not. 1. Most people view anything they don't understand and/or are not good at as magic that "is simply there and works this way". Most non-technical people I knew in my life -- not a small number, has to be north of 300 -- simply had no idea you could block ads. And something like the Pi-Hole they would never imagine even being possible. It'd be a spy movie tech for them. 2. Possibly controversial anecdotal observation of mine during my whole life: most normal folk are very maleable and accepting for the realities around them. Many of my peers call them "sheep" or other derogatory terms and even though on rare occasions I am pissed enough to agree with them, I still understand and realize that people have jobs and lives to deal with and they don't want to go out of their way to try and make a difference in the world. I used to be mad at that but nowadays, with me having suffered years of depression and burnout, I understand that regular folk all too well... 3. Related to the above: not many want to change society at large. As much as it boggled my mind, I actually heard a chunk of the people I met agreeing to have ads served to them. At certain point you have to wonder would you be the hero of the story that aims to bring down tech giants that harvest personal data, or the villain? I know I would view myself as the hero for sure but you gotta wonder sometimes. --- As an even more controversial aside, IMO the current breed of capitalism is ruthless and tries to fill every minute of people's leisure time with a ton of activities -- like doing taxes in huge convoluted procedures, poking you with notifications on your phone to hatch virtual eggs quicker with the diamond currency of your mobile game of choice or whatever, Facebook et al never leaving you alone about somebody posting something, and lots and lots of others. What I am trying to say is that most people I see around me are way too tired and broken to NOT accept tyranny.

res0nat0r 8y ago

I saw this post the other day, but this just seems like it is going to involve even more outrage at FB when the algorithm presents something incorrectly. Getting ads for "You just lost a child, would you like to call a helpline?" are going to outrage just as many people, which is why I expect they just stay away from that type of subject matter all together.

floatingatoll 8y ago
It wouldn’t outrage people who need the help.
thebiglebrewski 8y ago
How about just stopping the pregnancy ads? Why does it suddenly have to be serving ads about stillbirth?! Maybe just go back to serving pre-pregnancy ads, or ads about something else....or maybe just no ads at all, for a welcome respite?
ssully 8y ago
I think they are asking to stop being prodded with baby ads altogether, not to be shown ads for loss support hotlines.
skystrife 8y ago
The correct response is not to try to advertise targeting the traumatic event, but to pivot and avoid it and related subjects entirely. I doubt people will complain if ads about babies and parenting were to disappear after a still birth or miscarriage.
- basic1 8y ago
  >The correct response is not to try to advertise... Never going to happen, they say marketers ruin everything for a reason.
  - skystrife 8y ago
    I'm not saying "don't advertise at all", but rather "advertise something very different". Does that matter, though? Maybe not.

creaghpatr 8y ago

Suprised pregnancy doesn’t fall within the ‘no targeting based on health conditions’ policy of most ad platforms.

max76 8y ago
It's way to lucrative of a market to ignore.
mike_n 8y ago
from a marketer's perspective, it's one of the most lucrative life events, along with weddings and buying a house and falling ill -- huge amounts of money being spent on goods and services and new behaviors.
- gnu8 8y ago
  My life is my life, not a revenue stream for these parasites to capture. Adblocking isn’t good enough. There needs to be a way to punish these people and cost them money.
  - jonathankoren 8y ago
    Maybe I’m singing, “Don’t Ban The Bomb”[0], but algorithmic advertising literally pays the mortgage and puts food on my table. You can live your life just fine. No one is interfering with it. No more than getting a flier in the mail asking if you want to drive for Uber is a big disruption. In fact, enough people find some level advertising useful, and have for literally hundreds of years. [0] https://youtu.be/lSEtCz61O_8 https://youtu.be/lSEtCz61O_8
    - eertami 8y ago
      Useful to whom, the companies employing predatory behaviour and psychological tricks to convince people to buy things they do not need? There's no nice way to put this but the world would not be at all affected or a worse place if your company ceased to exist tomorrow. In fact you could argue many would be better off. I struggle to believe competant software developers can argue "oh but I didn't have a choice". You chose to join this company to put food on your table. There are many ethically good industries you could also work in to do so. Maybe you'd earn slightly less, but you could have a clean conscience.

joe_hills 8y ago

On an emotional level, this deeply troubles me—but to address the problem analytically: It strikes me that an ad algorithm that forces grieving people to opt out of social media at a time when their friends and family are most interested in checking in on their well-being may encourage a broader pattern of falling back on non-ad-supported communication channels in the weeks or months to come. It seems like there's a strong case to be made here that some ad-supported communication channels should consider either an ad-free grief mode when users are in distress, or at least sell a giftable ability to use the site without ads, in which case friends of the grieving could chip in to avoid this kind of distress.

whymauri 8y ago
I totally see what you mean, but the concept of gifting temporary "ad-free" internet media to grieving people feels dystopian to me.
- joe_hills 8y ago
  I'd prefer the systems avoided showing users upsetting ads for free, I'm just not sure how that system would work or how to prevent users from gaming it.
skystrife 8y ago
Interesting idea, but I'm bothered by the idea that social media platforms would be effectively monetizing grief in this solution. This sort of thing, to me, points at the deficiencies of appealing to purely statistical patterns without any guard rails placed on top. After all, statistically, the most likely relevant categories after "pre-natal" are going to be surrounding children who _were_ born safely. So if you appeal just to data alone, you won't likely solve this problem because it is relatively rare. The biggest failure, to me, is the response of the system when the user goes out of her way to say that the "pre-natal" ads are not relevant. Statistically it assumes successful birth, but that doesn't reflect her actual intent. A simple dialog tree would maybe suffice: "not relevant" -> "this specific thing is irrelevant" vs "suppress this and all related content". One signal says maybe don't show that particular brand again, and the other says to pivot the relevance model significantly away from that topical section of the ad space entirely.

dreamdu5t 8y ago

Oh God... the horror... the inhumanity... of seeing ads! How outrageous !

sctb 8y ago
We asked you many times to comment civilly but it's not happening so we've banned the account.

dannykwells 8y ago

I think it's things like this that will ultimately bring the downfall of the tech giants - the fact that even with "machine learning", the quality if the experience is still so low. They built an addictive product in the beginning, but now all of them are starting to make us feel nauseous, which is one of the fastest ways to break an addiction. It's true here for social media (in spades), but it's true with Amazon (sorting through all the junky products, never knowing if something is genuine), Netflix (all the junky content, barely curated), and many of the others as well. I think ultimately we will (re) learn that constant naive appeals to the lowest common denominator, while a fast way to make a buck, might not be the best long-term strategy.

pedrocr 8y ago
> I think ultimately we will (re) learn that constant naive appeals to the lowest common denominator, while a fast way to make a buck, might not be the best long-term strategy. That's the best case. The worst case is we've broken our attention spans and ability to interact without heavily optimized feel-good hits and get to keep both pieces. At least in politics we seem to have gone quite far down that path and I don't yet see a way out of re-learning proper discussion methods. Bright ideas are definitely needed here.
buboard 8y ago
Facebook in particular can easily fix this. Just use their friends to get the information.
colmvp 8y ago
I remain skeptical that it'll make a dent, honestly. People will still use Twitter, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc. because they provide enough convenience and positive experiences that outweigh the perceived negatives. I mean people know about the negatives of companies that use sweat shops, child labour, or who employ people in horrific working conditions, and yet these corporations are still very much the giants in their field. You have companies who source ingredients from companies that don't have great living conditions for livestock, and they're still in business. The tech giants will remain tech giants because as much as people will complain about it, they won't abstain. They won't stop using their phones, their websites, their apps, their search engines, their e-mail... because it's all too hard to give up.

40acres 8y ago

I've been really interested in a 'digital agent' model for a while now. Some profile, and/or grand set of settings that apply to all my interactions online. I interface with way too many platforms online to keep track of, this can lead to unwanted and annoying targeting similar to (but obviously on a much lesser scale) to this mother. I recently bought a shaving kit for my future brother-in-law for Christmas, I looked up some reviews on Google and Youtube and now every Youtube video and ad is regarding this particular shaving product. This product is now following me on the web, if I were able to simply tell my 'digital agent' "hey, I'm not interested in shaving products anymore" and have my agent then broadcast this message to Youtube, Instagram, etc. I think that'd be helpful.

walrus01 8y ago
I recently viewed the Amazon page for a 55 gallon drum of personal lubricant and you would not believe the weird ads I get now.
- darkr 8y ago
  Personalised recommendations can be a very slippery problem to solve.
jbob2000 8y ago
Or we could all just start googling and searching for things that are completely irrelevant to us. This would fuck up the advertising models and marketers would be forced to change their practices. So I say to you all: go and google some random shit and do some deep dives into it. Be predictably unpredictable.
- thanatropism 8y ago
  I run a comment reply bot on my reddit account on saturday afternoons/nights when I'm out. It just posts some highly-voted comment from a CSV. My reddit history makes no freaking sense.
- just_one_time_ 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

srvo 8y ago

This seems to happen a lot when one's experience is statistically unlikely, or when it doesn't neatly mesh with a commercial opportunity. For instance, I am a transgender woman and I get THE WEIRDEST ads. Makes sense, since an algorithm meshing together my engagement histories from ten years of social platforms must see something quite strange. The only appropriately targeted advertisements I get are from academics interested in studying me. Like: "are you a trans woman? Take this study and win a gift card." When platforms attempt to monetize me, they wind up pushing the brooks brothers dress shirt deals and so on that I used to gobble up in my prior life. I've taken my business local as a result, but the algorithmic rejection of my reality on these platforms takes a pretty consistent toll. I don't know what the solution is, but wanted to underscore that this is a broader problem.

40acres 8y ago
Very interesting perspective. I think stories like yours are why I believe in the ideas behind the diversity effort going on in tech right now. As a black male I've definitely interacted with these platforms and just have been puzzled by the outcomes. On the other hand I wonder, would you be okay with these ad networks being able to identify you as transgender? And then tailoring ads towards you? I'm sure there are things that are still interesting to you post-transition.
cronix 8y ago
I am coming to the conclusion that the only way to beat the system is to not play in the system. Or play as little as possible. I no longer go on FB, Instagram or Amazon. I do my best to just be anonymous. I don't "need" to hang out on social media. I lived quite happily before these services even existed, and will continue without them. We have control. We can resist their shiny toys. If we are waiting for THEM (or politicians) to fix these problems, we will die of old age waiting. It's antithetical to their business and self-interests. The only way to make them less powerful is to not give them your data. That is the source of their power. Information. Greetings Professor Falken Hello A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. (1983 - Wargames)
- paulie_a 8y ago

johnny_and1 8y ago

I feel like this is similar with Facebook "making it rain" whenever you send money through their messenger. It does not matter why you send the money, they always celebrate. Very distasteful and not taking into consideration the real reason. They presented this feature at MobileHCI'17 as part of their "Delight" mantra. They don't care about 100% accuracy, as long as it works for the majority, they will not cater to the minority.

misterprime 8y ago
"I got raped in college and need cash for an abortion". Sends money. YAAY!

GuiA 8y ago

Banksy on advertising, in 2004: People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs. The problem is that you can't graffiti or tear down a digital ad. Activism is nigh impossible in digital walled gardens.

johnchristopher 8y ago
You can do better and just install an ad blocker though. Activism against ads in public space is still a very much IRL activity.
random878 8y ago
>People are taking the piss out of you everyday. >in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. >what they like wherever they like with total impunity. >Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy >They never asked for your permission Sums up vandals like Banksy pretty well too.
jrockway 8y ago
I don't really see the difference between Banksy having himself plastered all over the media for shredding his artwork versus Colgate telling me to buy their toothpaste. Banksy understands and uses advertising better than anyone.

sixstringtheory 8y ago

Sounds a lot like “A friend of mine died and I didn’t know because of algorithms” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956811

politician 8y ago

I'm coming around to the idea that personalized ads should be classified along with biological weapons. The latter attacks your biology while the former attacks your mind. Consider the story about Russia hacking the 2016 elections through the use of a massive campaign of personalized ads on Facebook and Google to polarize communities through misinformation sites tailored to their personal biases. Whether you believe the Russia story or not, this set of actions would as surely constitute an attack on a civilian population as a deployment of a bioweapon tailored to cause mental confusion and delirium. Yet due to a blind spot and the daily delivery of these weapons on behalf of the major personalized ad aggregators, we do not recognize the severity of what's going on. Long-term elevated levels of stress hormones do real physical damage. Can you imagine if the survivors of Nagasaki were to react to the nuclear destruction of their city with the same careless indifference that we have towards the continuous attempts to reprogram our very minds?

alexchamberlain 8y ago

This is why we need Ethics Boards in software engineering.

benj111 8y ago

It always amazes me how stupid these company's algos are sometimes. Amazon tells me I've had an account with them for over a decade. It knows I've bought 2 kettles from them. When does it start serving ads for kettles? Just after I've bought one. On the other hand I'm not sure most people would want facebook wt al 'knowing' they've just lost their child, so other than getting rid of targetted ads, I'm not sure what other solution is best.

ryanlol 8y ago
>It always amazes me how stupid these company's algos are sometimes. If they're so stupid, why are they making so much money? Is an algo with a positive RoI really stupid?
- benj111 8y ago
  They are making money despite their algos. Amazon just suggests things I've looked at regardless of whether I've bought it. I hopefully won't be buying a new kettle for a few years, so its just wasted. Why don't they try upselling me related things instead of spamming me? Their algo has been suggesting things for over 10 years, based on over 10 years of buying data. I've clicked on zero of their ads or emails.

shpx 8y ago

She could install an ad blocker.

sigi45 8y ago

I really really think it is unethical to generate a video from my stream to show me my last year or whatsoever. Why? Fuck you why.do you really think I wanna feel good thanks to a standard algorithm which some software team wrote to engage me more? No. And yes it's fucking obvious to me how it works but it's not obvious to enough other people.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

nappy-doo 8y ago

Protip: No, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram didn't see you Googling anything.

pmlnr 8y ago
Riiiiight. Because none of these companies sell/buy data from eachother.
- ryanlol 8y ago
  Google certainly does not sell your search queries to twifacegram, that'd just be silly. If you have any evidence to the contrary, I would absolutely love to see it.

jakobegger 8y ago

Does anybody ever see relevant ads? I guess retargeting kinda works, if I look for info about mortages I see lots of ads from banks, but for anything else? We're all human, we're amazingly complex, everyone of us is unique, and nobody likes to be put in a drawer. But then you have the smartest programmers in the world, working for the richest companies in the world, and all they come up with is "if someone googles for baby show them ads for nappies"? It's remarkable how stupid these "smart" algorithms are, and I think the problem is a based on a simple fallacy: Everyone thinks of themselves as sophisticated, but believes others are simpletons. I'm not sure where to go from here.

soundwave106 8y ago
Based on a comment wesd linked to above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18535748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18535748), and applying that comment to all the large corporations behind ad-tech (because IMHO large corporate political problems are fairly similar no matter where you go)... It seems like for these systems, there are often multiple teams developing the algorithms, with multiple algorithms in play behind the recommendation. Each algorithm has their own style of metrics system. Some of them are probably relatively simple with not very sophisticated AI/ML (or even no AI/ML at all) behind it. And, there is a lot of internal political conflict preventing better analysis of said algorithms to refine them. In other words, you're absolutely right.
ryanlol 8y ago
>Does anybody ever see relevant ads? Are you serious? Does anyone ever make sales from advertising? Yes they do, even without retargeting.
mynameishere 8y ago
They are astonishingly terrible. I'm especially amazed by the spam sent straight from amazon. Like...high-end fashion. Huh? Maybe I bought a pair of men's socks and they think I want pricey handbags? Or...ads for books I've already purchased. Like, umm... They have almost two decades of my buying habits and that's the best they can do?

viburnum 8y ago

Let's just ban ad tech.

Rudism 8y ago

An error in the inverse direction, if these sites were to add dead-child-detecting algorithms, would be far worse in my opinion. Imagine you're a mother who stops posting for a while because you're staying in the hospital with your newborn who is unwell but still alive. You decide to post a long-overdue update to friends and family on Instagram or whatever and are suddenly served ads for child coffins and funeral services. Definitely the worse of two evils in this case.

hulton 8y ago

Is this Gillian person trolling or just extremely shallow?

paulddraper 8y ago

Twitter confuses me. There is a character limit on text, so its users post images of text? I know this is off-topic; it just seems an absolutely byzantine method of communication. Reminds me of sending a YouTube video with Word. https://xkcd.com/763/ https://xkcd.com/763/

dkrich 8y ago

I feel like I’m alone in asking this but does personal responsibility play no part in this? She starts by admitting that she voluntarily signaled to these platforms that she was pregnant. They are ad platforms. She then goes on to admit that she continued to go back on the platforms after and then blames them for showing ads she herself engaged with at one point! I don’t think anyone would ever wish someone grieving to be reminded of the source of the grief or say “too bad.” But I think a reasonable person could conclude this is a little unreasonable.

japhyr 8y ago
I didn't read that as she "voluntarily signaled to these platforms that she was pregnant". She made social media posts with many clear signals that she was pregnant. She basically said, "I know your algorithms can detect that I was pregnant. Can't your algorithms detect that my baby is no longer alive?" That seems like a pretty fair statement.
- dkrich 8y ago
  So now society is frustrated because it’s data isn’t being analyzed and used to serve ads effectively enough? We’ve officially come full circle. How about this- if you are uncomfortable with the prospect of ads potentially shown to you that may upset you based on recent history that’s now changed, lay off the platform for a while.
  - AndrewUnmuted 8y ago
    This is precisely the hazardous morality we begin to enter when we become as passively engaged as social media allows. The platform becomes an antidote to sadness; social media has reached a place in society where it's casually being used as a means for self-medication. People who are on social media appear to be deluding themselves into believing that social media can offer some sort of support and minimize the pain, but this is probably the biggest misconception about which we can convince the public otherwise.
- ryanlol 8y ago

gammateam 8y ago

This is the black mirror episode

crazygringo 8y ago

I don't mind the ads... I just wish we could manually update our inferred advertising profiles ourselves! Like, "I already bought that product on Amazon so you don't need to advertise it to me anymore." Like, "I already shop at store X so you don't need to keep showing it." Or the obvious case in this article. Sure, draw your inferences... but please let us correct them! If I'm gonna see ads, I want them to be relevant.

pdimitar 8y ago
You are assuming they optimize for a singular sale which we all know is not true. They want you to buy all the time.
justapassenger 8y ago
https://www.facebook.com/help/247395082112892?helpref=related https://www.facebook.com/help/247395082112892?helpref=relate... https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662856 https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662856
- crazygringo 8y ago
  Fascinating! Thanks, I'd never heard of this.

NorthOf33rd 8y ago

Instagram is not a person. Don't ask it to be decent. Those ads are not your friends. Don't expect them to treat you like they care. You're not sharing your information with a human. You're sharing it with a business who is tuned to maximize profit. The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative. They don't care about you. You've made the decision to let a business deep into your personal life, a space once reserved only for loved ones. These are the consequences.

Riseed 8y ago
> Those ads are not your friends. Don't expect them to treat you like they care. > You're not sharing your information with a human. You're sharing it with a business who is tuned to maximize profit. The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative. Considering only the profit aspect (because the ethics, social responsibility, and public opinion aspects have already been addressed elsewhere in this thread and on twitter): Surely it's a better ROI to have a user than to lose a user. Hence, it makes more sense for e.g. "stillborn" be a trigger word that stops/blocks pregnancy-related ads for X time than for the user to be so brokenhearted by the platform itself that they leave. Surely it's a better ROI to show relevant ads than offending ads. Hence, it makes more sense to show e-counseling ads to grieving eyes than to show them tragedy-reminder ads. Honestly, this seems like a no-brainer from any perspective.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Hence, it makes more sense for e.g. "stillborn" be a trigger word that stops/blocks pregnancy-related ads for X time than for the user to be so brokenhearted by the platform itself that they leave. Only iff you can be confident that the occurrence of this trigger word means that a person indeed experienced stillbirth, and wasn't just researching this, reading up on it because of fear, a non-native speaker looking up the definition of the word, etc. Metrics like this are really only weakly correlated with what (you'd think) they're trying to determine. Even targeted advertising is essentially a shotgun approach, as we don't even know what actually makes a person click on an ad. Also: as long as (probability of losing an user X their expected lifetime value) is lower than (probability of ad hitting a gullible person X money got from the ad), it's more profitable to just display the ad. People all over the thread seem to think that it's only about losing vs. not losing a user. But there's opportunity cost to not losing a user, and frequently it's judged not worth it. (It's good the author is raising a stink over this, it shifts the ROI calculations a little bit towards being more humane.)

bearcobra 8y ago

I'm genuinely curious what the reaction would be with non-programatic ads that presented similar content. Would it be just as painful if you were watching TV and got an ad for Huggies, or is it because we know the ads are personalized?

monksy 8y ago

While her situation is tragic, She's demonstrating a huge amount of entitlement and technically illiteracy. She's making assumptions that all of these studies from data science and usage of recommendation/personalization systems are for her benefit. They're not, she's not paying the bills on that. That's for someone to sell her something. She's entitled because she believes that her unusual/rare situation should be accounted for and encoded in their global system. Ok, I think I probably burned off a bit too much of the hn points there.. Now to get on my soapbox. Reporters like this are exactly why no one understands or cares about privacy. If we're to have an honest disussion about this, the crux of the issue is: Should we have control over the data and interactions we perform. (the US doesn't have a GDPR) The other thing that should be pointed out heavily: Most of the tech industry, in the last 10 years, has been solely focused on targeting the majority of people in profit grabs. This is an example of such of a focus.

danso 8y ago
Not everyone is as enlightened about data science as you seem to be. If you actually want GDPR-like reform in the U.S., then part of the discussion involves people pointing out the absurdities and injustice in how data science is currently implemented. Imagine your line of condescending argument being applied to someone complaining about being wrongly convicted and incarcerated, and who is calling for criminal justice reform. "You're entitled because you believe that your unusual/rare situation should be accounted for and encoded in the overall justice system" edit: and the author even points out how she has done the manual work to give feedback to the algorithm: > And when we millions of brokenhearted people helpfully click “I don’t want to see this ad,” and even answer your “Why?” with the cruel-but-true “It’s not relevant to me,” do you know what your algorithm decides, Tech Companies? It decides you’ve given birth, assumes a happy result, and deluges you with ads for the best nursing bras... You read this, and yet still saw fit to berate the author for being "entitled". And then, one sentence later, go on to proclaim about how the "crux of the issue is: should we have control over the data and interactions we perform"? How does that work exactly?
- monksy 8y ago
  As technical people: We generally understand that data science works in the following manner: 1. You collect and annotate data (This is probably about 90% of the work here) 2. Someone has a goal of something to find or query 3. Develop models that can solve that goal, or redefine 4. Use the output For the results of data science, you are always going to get generalized approximations of segments (groups of people) That's just how statistics work. (It's also how medicine tends to work as well.. but I digress) > Criminal justifce reform The consequences from are a lot higher. We've seen this over 1000+ years about some of the conerning court cases. That's why we have ideas such as "spirit of the law," human judges, juries, and appeals. Additionally, this is why the law is so complicated and murky. Computers are very bad at this. I'm especially hard on this individual because she's using her position with WaPO to try to publically "humiliate" those tech companies. > Giving feedback This is where some of the techincal literacy comes in a well, she doesn't seem to understand that the feedback requires human understanding is not something that is "intelligently" accounted for. Systems like that do not exist. The ad platform isn't something that is designed to accomidate her needs. (which is why I used the word entitled) It's a bit like being upset over those same ads being shown on TV. (media literacy covers, those are ads they may or may not be targeted towards you and those do not have to reflect your reality) --- As far as the data privacy bit goes: We should have control over the data that is collected about us and have the ability to remove it later. At the moment the strongest thing we have is the GDPR, but that's for European Union citizens only.

nyxxie 8y ago

I felt immense pity for the mother in this scenario, and after reading the article I agreed that FB aught to have some sort of way to indicate that such advertisements are offensive and should not be shown to the user. Ideally, I'd like to see a paid tier that gets rid of advertising altogether. Then I read some of the comments here and on other sites. To put it bluntly, I don't understand the tone of entitlement people have when they demand FB/Twitter/etc fix their individual problems. I mean, I obviously understand it - such services are very popular and play a big part of peoples' social circles and lives. What I don't understand is why they think they have a right to demand that a platform they aren't even paying for should cater to them. If everyone who disagreed with Facebook's revenue model were to leave Facebook, another platform would inevitably pop up that would cater to that new market niche. This seems to be the most fair solution to all parties, but instead it seems like people demand that someone compel FB to change based on their wants. I disagree with this not onlt because it's immoral and unfair, but also because it just means that those future FB competitors will have all sorts of obscure and unique regulatory hoops to jump through. Am I the only one who thinks this way?

jeremy7600 8y ago
No, I felt the same way. The platforms are just doing what they are programmed to do, its not meant to be offensive. The fact that it is offensive is not something a computer could detect, exactly, so in my mind the platforms have done nothing wrong.
- KingMob 8y ago
  But at the end of the day, humans are still in charge, not algorithms. If they can't adequately control the algorithms, perhaps they're not ready to be deployed. To see this a little more clearly, if a military deployed autonomous killer robots that kept accidentally killing civilian children, would you then argue the military isn't responsible?
  - jeremy7600 8y ago
    false equivalency, no thank you.

woolvalley 8y ago

What she is asking will probably be even more creepy. Currently these platforms are basically associating words to your user, which advertisers then select from a pull down. Past some specialized categories created out of advertiser demand - such as political leaning, location, age and gender - there isn't much reasoning behind it. First her user id got the pregnancy keywords associated, now she also has sad / still born words associated. The system isn't smart enough to reason that the two tags should be mutually exclusive in a culturally sensitive way, just like it doesn't with millions of other pairs around the world within 100s of other cultures & languages around the world. But if it was, then how much worse could it get in other ways?

danso 8y ago
The author describes manually removing herself from being targeted, e.g. clicking "I don't want to see this ad" and "It's not relevant to me". Are we supposed to be content with platforms that are unable to incorporate such manual feedback? I mean, we (the average user on HN) get pretty irate when software ignores or reverts config options we've previously set. I don't see how this is much different.

gwbas1c 8y ago

I never shared anything about our pregnancies on Facebook until the babies came. Anyway, it's stories like this that make me want to share even less personal information. It also shows that we've gotten far too carried away with marketing.

jlpicard 8y ago

Banner ads are fine. Im happy to visit a site that has the odd banner ad, hell even 1 or 2 ads in the side are fine too. Its the tracking that bugs the shit out of me. Tracking and pop ups. I'd use Facebook|Insta|Twitter more if it did less tracking, showed a couple of ads, allowed me to have a TIMELINE over a NEWSFEED and suggested maybe a few popular news stories from reputable news sources. If I want news stories from Daily Wire, I'll subscribe. If I want BBC, I'll subscribe. I get it, it'll make less money from less targeted ads - but it'll probably feel less ethically bankrupt. Or maybe im just a mad man. If Amazon ads were a bit smarter ( like yeah, I JUST purchased 12 cans of Monster - I dont need another fucking ad ) I'd be less annoyed at the ads.

michaeleisel 8y ago

Interesting story, not sure if it's very actionable.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

SergeAx 8y ago

I've never been in such a terrible situation, and I hope I never will, but. Modern online ads are so annoying I can't help but making serious effort to eliminate it from my online life. Adblockers, filtering proxies and so on. I believe that's the only way to deal with this monstrosity in a short perspective.

rargramble 8y ago

Maybe don't share your whole fuckin life on social media

IronWolve 8y ago

Early days on Facebook kept trying to get me to add my ex as a friend, they didnt understand "block" very well.

jerrac 8y ago

This might have already been said, but whatever happened to ads based on the content of the page you are on? If I'm reading an article about manufactured homes, an ad linking to a manufactured home seller could be actually useful. Granted, I haven't turned of my ad blocker in a very long time, so maybe they still exist?

mmmmmmmmm 8y ago

Please change the headline to "Dumbfuck journalist reveals self to be dumbfuck." Facebook doesn't know you searched for information about stillbirths because Facebook isn't Google. How fundamentally unintelligent do you have to be to not understand this? I'd be shocked if her IQ was above 90.

sabujp 8y ago

adblock, ublock, zap every fucking ad

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

nvr219 8y ago

Another great reason to install ublock origin, privacy badger, and to put facebook and the gang in different browser instance / container

d--b 8y ago

Tough story... What’s interesting in the post is that the author is not mad at ads in the first place, she’s angry at the failure of the algorithm to adapt to her situation. So this is something that companies could fix. Like when they infer something about your state, they could ask you about it, and have a setting “on and off” ads. Like: “hi, our algo tells us you may be pregnant, are interested in seeing ads for these kinds of stuff or not”? And that could be a setting you could remove. Maybe it’ll spook some users off... In any case there should be a button “stop trying to infer shit about me”. Perhaps it’d be a good way to introduce pay $5 a month for total privacy Facebook.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

camillomiller 8y ago

Two years ago my relationship of 11 years came to an end. While I was going through a very painful breakup, Facebook would constantly inundate me with “memories” full of fake algorithmically tuned enthusiasm. My ex was constantly part of that. Understandably, so. I just wonder what it would be for someone that has actually lost a child or a dear one. Yes, I know I can deactivate the relationship status and choose not to see that person anymore, but that won’t work with memories that don’t have that person tagged in, but will still depict something that you’ve still done together in the past, like the picture from a trip, a piece of furniture you built together, or a pic of her amazing cat (who also tragically died years ago).

remilouf 8y ago

My wife and I went through something similar a little less than a year ago (baby die at 6 months from a heart failure). Every now and then I still get the occasional diaper ad popping up. What disturbs me the most are colleagues who said it was my fault since I hadn’t shared my grief on social media, and algorithms could not learn (I work in data « science »). As if targeted advertising was a law of Nature and there was nothing we could do about it. Just deal with it. And blame yourself for not showcasing your pain in front of hundreds of people. The issue with algorithms is not that these events are statistically unlikely (unfortunately). They just have memory, enough memory to be accurate. So the day happy messages are replaced with the word « death », it hasn’t had the time to learn baby was not there anymore. There may be ways to improve that, but I bet you’d be trading accuracy for the remaining 95% people. Guess what version wins at a business meeting? I’m not blaming colleagues who write these algorithms. They didn’t know this could happen, they didn’t think about it before this happened to me. We’re all math and CS geeks priding ourselves in [insert your metric here] score above the 90% mark, and that’s all we optimize for. I’ve heard a joke once that the difference between science majors and humanities major was that scientists build the atomic bomb, humanities major explain to them why it’s not a good idea to use it. Targeted advertising is not as bad as the atomic bomb, of course, but you get the idea.

vasco 8y ago

Not as dramatic and much simpler to fix, yet still broken: Search for one-time things (say a new phone) on amazon. Purchase said things. Continue getting ads for new phones for weeks. Surely they must realize that after you purchase a phone re-targetting will only be effective at least a year+ later.

smsm42 8y ago

I am surprised how many comments here complain about things that would not be a problem if one used adblocker. I mean, I have no problem with people wanting to see ads, but I don't really understand - why? I can count on my fingers how many times I saw an ad that was genuinely useful for me - and I probably could keep typing while I'm counting. But if I use a device without an adblocker, they start to annoy me in minutes, and sometimes just make browsing completely useless. Of course, it's hard to get rid of 100% of ads, but it's not complicated to get rid of about 90%.

syrrim 8y ago

"Ads were my best friends - until they weren't" I used to love ads. Every time I saw a new ad show up, I'd get a little bit excited, knowing that it would be my friend for the next few month or years. When I saw an old familiar ad, I made sure to greet it, so that it doesn't get lonely. I took it as part of my social responsibility - the same as picking up after my dog - to buy products when I'd seen enough ads for them. That's not to say all ads were good - sometimes, I would see an ad for something that I didn't like. But this was always a cause for reflection - had I forgotten to tell the machine about some private detail of my life, the knowledge of which it could have targeted me better? On those occasions, I would make a promise to feed it more data, to make sure it was more able to help me. Then, I would dutifully mark the ad "I don't want to see this ad", to inform it of it's mistake. The machine would always learn quickly, and go back to showing me happy, friendly ads. I would be extra careful to buy those products, to make sure the mahcine knew it was doing a good job. But. There came a time when the machine started making mistakes, and wouldn't stop. I had realized that only two people - me and my husband - simply couldn't buy that many things, and we needed more mouths as tributes to the machine. I had entered a new stage in my life, and was already buying more products than I ever had before. And the machine was cooperative, helpful, bringing me new friends every day. And that would have continued being the case, as my child grew the machine would have helped it select its' college. But it never grew up. Because it was never born. Because it was stillborn. And the machine didn't learn. And when I told it I wanted ads for antidepressants and cabbage, it didn't listen. It kept on showing me ads for products for a baby that I would never have. And I could follow, as the years passed, each stage of my unborn babies life, as the machine desperately tried to target ads at it. What once were my friends have become my worst nightmare. What once was my partner in better supporting my consumerism, became my tormentor. What once was a happy member of society became a broken shell. It could happen to you too. Also: >there are 26000 stillbirths in the US every year >when we millions of broken-hearted thought that would slip by me if you broke it over two pictures, did you?

leavjenn 8y ago

And now she starts getting adoption ads: https://twitter.com/gbrockell/status/1072992972701138945 https://twitter.com/gbrockell/status/1072992972701138945 . "We're sorry your baby passed away, how about get a new one from here?" That's sick.