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Afraid to Google a thing because I don't want the algorithm to think I like it
- Nihilartikel 6y agoOn YouTube I create multiple channels to curate my recommendations. I have multi modal tastes but most recommendation systems don't really seem to deal with feedback that spans independent interests very well. So, one channel for how-to's, crafting, and tech talks. One for instrumental and foreign language focus music, etc..
- franciscop 6y agoAh the solution is simple, technology is advanced enough that you can easily build a music player yourself with local files. (this is a HN joke) (but I did start building my own music player) https://twitter.com/FPresencia/status/1379765168482172940 https://twitter.com/FPresencia/status/1379765168482172940
- krono 6y agoIt's so weird, across all Google's products I occasionally get these weird Arabic and sometimes even Islamic content suggestions. I've never opened any of these links, am not behind a VPN, am very much not Arabic and do not understand the language, and - with all due respect - am completely uninterested in Islamic holy scripture. Why, even after all these years, Google thinks this is content I'd want to see is a complete mystery to me. Something I'm going to have to live with for the rest of my life it seems.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoI can think of several explanations. The least likely is that for some reason your IP (or one of the IPs) is misattributed to another country by their geolocation mapping system. Another is that some of your property have been used by an Arab (you bough a second-hand device, lost a phone etc). More probably ones: one of your devices might have been infected or you might have clicked an ad that was disguised by something else but was linked to products/services offered in Arabic.
- krono 6y agoYes those are the only explanations I came up with as well, but none of that applies. I have kept a log of all IPs I regularly connected from, and only a single one of those originated in another country - another European one. Never lost a device (jinxed now) or bought or even temporarily used a second-hand one. An ad or intrusion do seem to be the most likely culprits, but ads are blocked everywhere, and I believe my security hygiene to be pretty decent. This has been going on for over a decade now. Due to the sporadic nature if these happenings, I'm almost starting to think there's some old (but still wrong) data stuck on some edge node somewhere - or perhaps someone at Google is actively teasing me for being so critical of the company :)
- numpad0 5y agoFor me it’s India. “xyz price in India” “restaurant in Delhi” “product - amazon. in” “how to say word in Hindi” and so on. tf?
- mmerlin 5y agoTensorflow? yep the hyperparameters for the search suggester model need a lot more tuning
- greshario 6y agoUse duckduckgo and this is a non-issue.
- azureel 6y agoI think this reply is for you https://twitter.com/jjcollinsworth/status/1390666239450755074 https://twitter.com/jjcollinsworth/status/139066623945075507...
- fuzxi 6y ago"I complained on a public forum and received advice. What a horrible day to have an internet connection."
- 0-_-0 6y agoWow this guy loves to be a victim in as many ways as possible to squeeze into 3 tweets! This must be a kind of a Twitter archetype.
- jessaustin 6y agoWomen just love it when random internet dudes pull the "if I were a woman you couldn't point out how trite and pointless my complaint is, so let's just assume I am a woman and you shut up now" card. It's so cool for them to be the exemplars of the trite and the pointless.
- pessimizer 6y agoTo spell it out: it takes an increasing amount of effort to avoid any of your interests being tracked, logged, and almost immediately used in ways that you already know will be destructive. This is also an IT professional and a programmer saying this, so they do not want your advice. The fact that they can use many, many countermeasures which require many, many rabbitholes of research, that as a programmer they are able to understand (although they will have to be continually updated) is not a way to fix that fear it's the manifestation of that fear. After 9/11 and the Patriot Act, librarians fought the government to keep the reading habits of patrons private as a core duty like doctors pledge to do no harm. Now it's difficult to get people to understand why clicking through to an attractive hammock while browsing Amazon registering in 900 databases and manifesting in ads and cold calls selling tropical vacations and being flagged on some government system as 2% more likely to be a flight risk if let out on bond (who am I kidding, AI doesn't give percentages, it just gives conclusions, looking at a hammock might be that stray pixel that can turn an OCR "O" into a "Q") - difficult to get some people to understand why that would make you nervous. The answer to that isn't "use TOR to get to a VPN to browse amazon, and pay for that with a burner debit card loaded with bitcoin" or whatever works this week. There isn't really a hammock. edit: also Amazon has that figured out, some researcher there figured out that they can identify you based on your click patterns and timing. Right now you can choose between 1) an app that will just click on everything silently, or 2) another app by a professor at some midwestern university that will jerk around the timing and positioning of your clicks in a way that throws your fingerprint off. The first app has been banned by every store, and triggers 80 warnings and a waiver that has to be signed with two-factor even if you manage to root your phone and sideload it. You have to compile the second app yourself, with a weird toolchain, and it draws in 640Mb of npm libraries. It's already been updated three times in response to Amazon's countermeasures, and the professor just wrote a paper about the entire method probably being ultimately doomed.
- diegocg 6y agoDisable your search history
- anticensor 6y agoYou can remove individual items from your search history.
- LudwigNagasena 6y agoEven in a tweet about algorithms the guy can’t help but dunk on men to show what a nice guy he is.
- robertwx 6y agoRainbow, BLM, it's all there, so he can afford the sharp reaction towards the "random dudes". Without the protective ideological shield, that reaction would have been deemed "hostile" and "toxic" by the twitteria.
- domnomnom 6y agoLmao good catch. Can someone explain the alternate reality we seem to exist in? Do y’all see these people around a lot?
- anotha1 6y agoWeak ad hominem attack. Not sure why you wasted a comment for it.
- nvilcins 6y agoI think your comment better applies to the tweet being referred to, though, not sure "ad hominem" extends to a group of unspecified people.
- rexf 6y agoIs there a term for using Google services less to minimize your risk of inadvertently running into a ban happy algorithm? I realize the thing to do is not rely on their services, but that's much easier said than done
- gostsamo 6y agoAuto censorship is the general term.
- dusted 6y agoctrl + shift + p
- hoppla 6y agoNow my printer also knows what I read
- capableweb 6y agoAh the confusion of application-specific shortcuts VS OS-global ones... You're clearly a Chrome user :)
- DoomHotel 6y agoUse Firefox Focus on mobile. On desktop, set Firefox to purge everything when closing the browser. Use Chrome only when necessary to do strictly Google-related things.
- jackjeff 6y agoFair enough. But to what extent would the algorithm know about you if you clear cookies/storage data though? I also imagine changing IP addresses help… does Google use IP as a source for profiling?
- nichch 6y agoI can’t speak for what data points Google uses for tracking, however... with JavaScript, there is a plethora of information that can be used to uniquely identify you across IPs, and even across browsers. [0] If you’re logged in to a service on multiple devices you have now linked multiple fingerprints to your account that can be compared against third party data. A VPN will not protect you from this tracking. [0] https://amiunique.org/ https://amiunique.org/ (I’ve plugged this site before, so I feel like I should say I am not affiliated with it)
- marderfarker2 5y agoAn even better site for determining your browser uniqueness from EFF. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ Gives you the entropy your browser is giving out in number of bits.
- stephc_int13 6y agoI feel the same, and I stopped using Chrome, Gmail, Google Search and Facebook quite a long time ago. I am not afraid, but annoyed to not have "manual mode" internet where everything I do has no hidden consequences and is simply what I asked.
- werid 6y agoIt's annoying clicking some youtube link only to find it was something you really don't want more of, and then youtube proceed to recommend much more of it, even though you barely watched any of it. kinda forces me to watch something else that is new but at least somewhat wanted in an attempt to make the algorithm look at the new shiny i'm interested in and forget the previous one. i find it funny though when amazon still make recommendations to me based on a purchase in 1998. yes, Jeff, i still want to buy wrestling VHS tapes...
- JoeyBananas 6y agoYou should use the dislike button to let the algorithm know that you didn't enjoy the video.
- shp0ngle 6y agoYou can delete your YouTube history, which will make the recommendations usually disappear.
- cookguyruffles 6y agoI never log into YouTube and this still happens, it's at least in part keyed to IP address
- beforeolives 6y agoThis will kind of clean up your current recommendations but it doesn't reset the recommendation algorithm like it used to. The algorithm still retains memory of your past behaviour. For example if I consistently listen to 3 unrelated songs [A B C] on youtube together, the algorithm will regularly recommend them to me (because of my unique behaviour, not because they're similar). If I reset my history and then listen to song A, then B and C get immediately recommended even though they aren't similar to A and they don't exist in my listening history which means that the information about my listening/browsing habits is still there in the recommendation model.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
- wodenokoto 6y agoI think Netflix is the worst offender. If you spend a minute too long looking at the menu for a movie it will not only auto play, but for the foreseeable future Netflix will assume you’re watching it, want to finish watching it and watch similar stuff. More than most other services Netflix doesn’t trust your ratings or your lists when making up recommendations.
- mrweasel 6y agoNetflix apparently have no idea what I like. Well maybe they do, but don’t actually that type of content, so they just throw random junk at me.
- laurent92 5y agoIt feels like Netflix knows what I like and throws things I don’t like at me on purpose, just to see whether I’ll change my mind. (So I unsubscribed) The discovery is specifically what makes Youtube, Netflix or Spotify sticky beyond just content hosting, and even at suggestions, pirate websites are better at it.
- emrah 6y agoYou can delete half watched things from your history so they don't show up in the main UI
- pseudalopex 6y agoYou can turn off auto play FYI.
- BugsJustFindMe 5y agoYou can disable autoplaying of next episodes in a series that you're watching, and you can disable autoplaying of previews, but I don't see any way to disable autoplaying of movies and shows in general when you're looking at their info pages.
- 5y ago
- crispyambulance 6y agoI don't know how common this is, but I've gotten into the habit of creating "personas"-- different users that have different habits and are interested in different things, yet all me. It's insane that I feel it helpful to take on "multiple personalities", but there it is. Part of it is that these algorithms are fairly one-track. They can mix it up a bit, but it's always too much of one thing and too little of another. They can't truly comport with the reality that someone can have multiple interests and tastes.
- cblconfederate 6y agoanother solution is to use 2 instances of chrome or firefox with different --user-data-dir which can run in parallel . It's actually very convenient for checking up stuff without 'messing' the main setup
- isaacimagine 6y agoI have multiple about:profiles on Firefox, each with different accounts (think school vs personal vs work etc.) Works quite well.
- scoopertrooper 6y agoWhy not use the built-in profile functionality?
- mschuster91 6y agoGod knows if Google does any kind of cross-correlation between them. I would actually expect it.
- scoopertrooper 6y agoThey are also part of the Chromium project, so you're welcome to check it out, inspect the source code, and build it locally.
- thrower123 6y agoAny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and induces magical thinking. This is a quarter step away from voodoo and south seas cargo cult rituals.
- skrebbel 6y agoI'm mildly curious about the whole Jordan Peterson anti-woke movement. Mildly, as in, I'm interested in the arguments but I often don't agree with them. I once made the mistake of clicking on a Peterson YouTube video and subsequently got only obscene alt-right "Peterson KILLS stupid feminist reporter!!" type of edited content. Like at some point 80% of my suggestions was crap like that, drowning out all the lovely nerdy Tom Scott stuff I come to YouTube for. I had to reset all suggestions to get away from it. Whenever I now see a video like that about the culture wars (or about covid for that matter), I open an incognito browser and search for the title. It's nuts that this is necessary. It's come to a point that I now hate suggestion engines with a passion. I wish I could simply only see the tweets/videos/whatever from people I follow/subscribe, chronologically. I can't figure out whether the people making these services are simply incompetent or downright evil. The AI future is now and it's awful.
- phendrenad2 6y agoI think that in the future, having a way to tell the algorithm "I didn't like this" will be common courtesy. Especially as the algorithm becomes stronger, I.E. companies offload more and more curation to ML.
- neartheplain 5y agoOn YouTube, this exists. On the Home screen where you get video recommendations, you can mouse-over each video title, click the little three dots, and mark that you're not interested in a video or channel. They'll never show up again in your recommendations.
- domnomnom 6y agoIt’s going to kill us
- chiefalchemist 6y agoSame. Worse is the fact it continues to make the same suggestions no matter how many times I scroll past, no matter how many other videos I watch. I find Spotify similar. I try a suggested playlist. I check out after 2 or 3 songs. It doesn't get the hint.
- asadkn 6y agoSure lots of negatives, but in a few cases, it can also be useful. I have carefully used a YouTube account that's specifically trained for just the right music recommendations that the auto-play just works mostly right. I use stimulating music (not relaxing) for work mainly, playing in background, and don't want to keep finding new music. Novelty is an important factor in stimulatory music. So this has been great for me.
- failwhaleshark 6y agoDon't use Google to search. DDG!
- sas41 6y agoIt's crazy just how much I go out of my way to avoid things that "personalize" my experience. I don't use online music services, I discover music on various platforms and and download mp3s and keep a local library. I avoid Youtube at it's defaults, I use 3rd party apps and VLC to do most of my watching, other than my subscriptions I tend to skim the Home page very rarely. I do not use Netflix or other streaming services, I try to hunt down DVDs/Blu-Rays and prefer ripping them for my personal library. My only problem is exclusives, as a fan of The Witcher series, I do feel like I am missing out, but if I feel a really strong urge I can always borrow an account from a friend, create a temp profile, watch the series and delete it. Their convenience features just add more inconvenience to me.
- qualudeheart 6y agoYou should abstain from googling politically incorrect ideas. It is possible that the state will require searches for for politically incorrect content be logged and used to create a profile on possible dissidents.
- gundmc 5y agoWhat country do you live in?
- hedora 5y agoNo idea what country they’re in, but the US government’s already logging such things: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/can-government-look-your-web-habits-without-warrant-senators-hope-n1207936 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/can-government-look-yo...
- qualudeheart 5y agoAmerican. Programs like this almost definitely exist in America. Even if they didn‘t, it would only be a matter of time for them to be implemented since it is in the interest of the state to monitor its population for behavior that could be dangerous to it. That isn‘t even necessarily bad! It‘s just problematic that it could easily be used for immoral surveillance. It‘s imo a good thing to identify likely future terrorists. It‘s not a good thing to surveil members of e.g. sexual minorities or peaceful dissidents. I‘m a recent immigrant, so I am sorry if my English sounds weird.
- neartheplain 5y agoNot an unreasonable concern. Remember Google's Project Dragonfly? They were building and testing a system which would not only censor Google Search in mainland China, but provide Communist Party authorities with unlimited access to search logs. They only stopped because they got caught, and enough Google employees caused a stir about it internally. The executives who supported this project and kept its existence secret within Google are still with the company. Who's to say they won't try again, in China or any other country? https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/google-china-censored-search/ https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/google-china-censored-se... >Locating core parts of the search system on the Chinese mainland meant that people’s search records would be easily accessible to China’s authoritarian government, which has broad surveillance powers that it routinely deploys to target activists, journalists, and political opponents.
- mrweasel 6y agoThe dumb thing about recommendation algorithms are that they assume that I’d like the same things, regardless of my mood or current situation. YouTube Music at least try to make guesses based on the time of day, but fail to take the actual music into account and just focus on the bands, and not the tempo, lyrics and overall sound of a track. The only “algorithm” that sort of work is Amazons book recommendation, but I’m not sure that not just based on what others have bought.
- realreality 6y agoIn the novel, "Feed", one of the characters has a hobby of searching for all sorts of random things, in order to confuse the algorithms. She would add absurd items to her shopping cart, without buying any of them. The book, written in 2002, was very prescient.
- weeweww32 6y agoShould've used NORDVPN FOR ONLY 2,75 A MONTH!
- aulin 6y agothe thing I hate the most are personalized ads and amazon suggestions that keep pestering you for weeks about an item you just bought and don't need anymore
- azureel 6y agoYou bought a cable for your phone yesterday. Why don't you buy another one? Don't you wanna buy? You sure? Here are the best single cables in your area ready to be hooked.
- 627467 6y agoIt's funny, just today I noticed how much worse is Google Now feed (or whatever it's called today) because it keeps repeating news items and category that I have very little interest in. It's almost like Google is trying to save money by computing less accurately for my interests.
- solarkraft 6y agoI like recommendation features in principle. I don’t want an unfiltered feed of stuff. It would just be nice if they were configurable, understandable and actually worked for me. Some systems’ “We’re showing you this because ...” is an important first step, but it needs to go way, way, further. Big companies probably don’t do it because they’re afraid of overwhelming a user, disclosing too much about their own algorithm and the things they know (“We’re showing you this because someone you hung out with on Instagram just before you met”). Thus it’s probably up to open source projects again to make algorithms that actually work for people, not against them. Are there any such projects already? Are there projects trying to dissect common proprietary recommendation systems? They’re some of the most mysterious influences on current society.
- lonk11 5y agoMy hobby project https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com (use invitation code 'hn') is a content recommendation system that is built around these principles: - Control: what you see is based on your explicit upvotes & downvotes, not what you happened to click on. - Transparency: you see content from feeds that posted content you upvoted and from other users who upvoted what you upvoted, but did that before you. For example, when you upvote a link it will tell you that "You will get more content from 2 users that also liked it and from 3 feeds that posted it". And when you see a recommendation from other users you can see what likes in common do you have with those users (“We’re showing you this because ...”). - Fairness: the amount of attention every user and feed gets from you depends on how useful their past recommendations have been. Ie, the higher their signal-to-noise ratio has been for you - the more prominently their other upvoted items will be in your "feed". Give it a try and let me know what you think. I'd like to do a "Show HN" post for my project soon and your feedback would help me prepare for it. If you like to read a bit more here are my announcements with discussions: - https://tildes.net/~tech/u7f/linklonk_a_link_aggregator_with_a_trust_system https://tildes.net/~tech/u7f/linklonk_a_link_aggregator_with... - https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/mpqnpl/linklonk_a_link_aggregator_with_a_trust_system_an/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/mpqnpl/...
- mateo1 5y agoThere is one problem really. These companies are not charging money for their services. It's the same problem with other mega-corps. They can afford short and medium-term losses to kill other players entering the field. This is the root cause of so many problems in capitalism. There are of course other challenges preventing people and corporations from entering this field but at this point I don't even think there's hope. They have not only destroyed everyone else in the private sector, but they partnered with governments and political entities in such a way that their continued rule is basically cemented in place. You won't get the recommendations that you know would be good for you because they're not trying to do something good for you, they're trying to extract more value from you.
- smitty1e 6y agoSounds like an opportunity for a search proxy service. Which begets an arms race of proxies, and fake proxies sponsored by Google, fuzz proxies blowing up the signal-to-noise ratio for your account, TOR proxies for the "double-hush-hush" searches. . . Who knew that the act of finding stuff would be such a voyeuristic delight?
- CyberRabbi 5y agoThe height of first world inconvenience
- idatum 5y agoPut in an old DVD of Dr. Strangelove:... recently in the XBox. It was just a random thought to pop it in and enjoy. (okay, was cleaning up shelf) I eventually realized I could skip around and enjoy the parts I liked. Freely. Without that feeling of being watched. Flashback.
- ectopod 5y agoIs your XBox online? Are you sure the DVD player doesn't report back what you're watching and how you're watching it?
- lreeves 5y agoOr your smart TV.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y agoWhich, for those out of the loop, is likely taking random screenshots of the displayed image and uploading enough data up positively correlate images to known content, or more, I haven't bothered to learn these things. The people who implement them are creepy af though.
- specialist 5y agoThese comments made me wonder if any smart TVs have something like built-in content-id detection, which then somehow gets shared with the mother ship. One precedent is Nielsen Audio's Portable People Meter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Audio#Portable_People_Meter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Audio#Portable_People_... I assume that if surveillance can be done, someones are doing it.
- astrange 5y agoThey do. That's literally the reason Vizio TVs are so cheap. Knowing this, I leave it on because I want everyone to be forced to watch what I watch.
- 5y ago
- MaxBarraclough 5y agoUse a private browsing/incognito window then. Not bullet-proof, but probably good enough.
- pizza234 5y agoNot so easy. It seems that major companies are on the offensive against privacy. Google search, map and translate display a pop up. Youtube search displays two (!). Bing translator is the most dishonest - for anything else than a trivial sentence, it requires a captcha to be completed, pretending that it detected abnormal traffic (I know it's a lie, because if I don't use private mode, it doesn't do this). The services above essentially defeat address bar (keyword-based) searches. It's interesting (and not in a good way) times. I've changed almost all the services I use, which is something I've never considered before. I have to say that there are valid alternatives, though.
- yrygfjv 5y agoWhat do you mean? It doesn't matter how many popups or CAPTCHAs the sites make you deal with: as long as you don't log in to your Google account, any searches you make with an incognito window shouldn't be associated with your Google identity. They'll be associated with your IP address (and of course browsers can in principle be fingerprinted, etc.) If there's any reason to believe that Google tries to defeat incognito mode and associate that history with a particular Google account, I haven't heard it, and it seems really unlikely, given the things people are expected rely on incognito mode for.
- lupire 5y ago> given the things people are expected rely on incognito mode for. I don't think Google tracks these things in regular search either. My interests profile doesn't include my favorite porn.
- new_guy 5y agoGoogle in $5bn lawsuit for tracking in 'private' mode: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52887340 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52887340
- salakotolu 5y agoPersonalized feeds are broken. I think there's work to be done to improve content discovery.
- mindslight 5y ago> I'm afraid to skip a song because I don't want the algorithm to block all songs like it. Weird, can't reproduce on mpd/ncmpc. (stop using hostile software!) But seriously I was just explaining to some friends how my use of Audioscrobbler two decades ago has stuck with me, in that sometimes when I jump around in a track I have a quick thought of whether my listening to that song will have been counted. Even such a simple dynamic created long lasting behavioral effects, and these days we're all just swimming in such external context with every piece of remote code trashware we're goaded into using.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fartcannon 5y agoI don't log in to anything google related, I have youtube/google stuff containerized and when I close my browser window it clears all my history and cookies, etc. I surf with ublock on and max privacy settings in the browser. I use YouTube via RSS. My quality of life is incredible.
- HWR_14 5y agoYoutube has an RSS feed?
- fdgdd 5y agoYes — https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=… https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=… You could also just put the channel URL into your RSS/Atom reader and it might convert it automatically.
- HWR_14 5y agoThanks! I wonder how many features like this exist that I could use if I knew about them. Does anyone know if Netflix/Hulu/etc. have an accessible database of their content? Most of my search results reference a Netflix API that seems to no longer be accessible.
- mleonhard 5y agoDo your connections to Google come from your home IP address?
- hedora 5y agoHonest question: Why are you logged into Google? If you must use gmail, use imap. The only other “sticky” service they offer (that benefits from a login) is docs. So, use some other office suite, or keep a separate browser installed just for docs. Problem solved, I think.
- qualudeheart 5y agoIf you wanted to scale that across more identities you could probably use seperate vms. If you have enough RAM it‘s really easy to do. That would beat browser fingerprinting as long as browser A running in VM A looks different enough from browser B running in VM B. The average browser is unique out of like 300 thousand other browsers but with the right settings you can get that down to more like 1 in 10.
- Wolfenstein98k 5y agoIncognito.
- disillusioned 5y agoI use incognito mode ALL of the time for this. I'm looking up things that I _know_ will retarget me but aren't really relevant or I don't want linked to me _forever_. Like a medical condition for a friend, for instance. I don't need Google retargeting me cancer ads. All. the damn. time.
- fsflover 5y agoThis is an example of Social Cooling: https://socialcooling.com https://socialcooling.com Personally, disposable virtual machines on Qubes OS for browsing make me less stressful about that.
- RohMin 5y agoIt must be miserable to use technology with such paranoia.
- reinkaos 5y agoI also don't want certain things in my browser autocomplete history so every time I have a question I think is dumb I open an incognito window.
- ivan1783 5y agoSpotify cannot figure out that I don't listen to German/French podcasts/books and constantly recommends them to me. My interface is English, I listen to primarily English but also Russian/German/French music and will often specifically click off of French/German music and after 5 years it still cant figure out that I don't want fucking French and German books and podcasts. WTF SW people, I thought this was your bread and butter...don't even get me started on youtube ads which seem to follow the country you're currently in, like...how haven't you figured out which languages I speak after using you for 10 years.
- fouadf 5y agoI use duck duck go when I want to do that