8 ms·

Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway (2019)

75 points by kruuuder 3y ago

jruohonen 3y ago
"The state of personalized recommendations is surprisingly terrible. At this point, the top recommendation is always a clickbait rage-creating article about movie stars or whatever Trump did or didn't do in the last 6 hours." "There's no magic here. If you use ML to teach a computer how to sort through resumes, it will recommend you interview people with male, white-sounding names, because it turns out that's what your HR department already does. If you ask it what video a person like you wants to see next, it will recommend some political propaganda crap, because 50% of the time 90% of the people do watch that next, because they can't help themselves, and that's a pretty good success rate."
- karmakaze 3y ago
  I realized that most recommendation systems are bad because they are optimized for the aggregate not the individual. I keep getting recommendations for recent popular content, because it will have high engagement for the masses. For everyone that isn't part of that mainstream, the system doesn't care about. Some recommendation systems that try to do better may fare better. As for ad-tech, if I'm getting ads for washer-dryers after a recent purchase, then they're counterproductive.
  - jruohonen 3y ago
    True enough. Granted, as the article also mentioned (if I recall correctly), some recommender systems are actually quite good. For me, finding new music to listen from a particular genre fits into this category.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    "Engagement" is just code for addiction. They couldn't care less about personalizing content for our tastes. They want us constantly "engaging" with stuff. Scrolling all day on the apps. This maximizes the amount of advertising we see. Advertising is the root of all this evil.
  - grotorea 3y ago
    > I realized that most recommendation systems are bad because they are optimized for the aggregate not the individual. That reminds me of something I'm not sure is the same, but maybe it is. Anyone also feels that a few years ago the Steam "related games" section switched from being not necessarily mainstream games that were actually similar to what you're looking at to being mostly whatever the most popular games that share any genre at all with the game on the page you're at?
    - IggleSniggle 3y ago
      Yes. Steam recommendations used to be absolutely superb. Now they're just "good," with a lot more "crap" baked in.
    - karmakaze 3y ago
      When I say 'optimized for the aggregate', that sounds like pleasing the most people most of the time, but what it often means is maximizing profit and not otherwise caring about users' experience.
  - npsimons 3y ago
    > For everyone that isn't part of that mainstream, the system doesn't care about. The sad part is, this is exactly why I left broadcast radio and TV and movie theaters behind. With some heuristics and filters in place, this sort of thing was solvable online, but nope, the market beckons, pulling everyone ever forward into its gaping maw . . .
agentultra 3y ago
For ad targeting and recommendation algorithms, sure. "Privacy," though isn't about Google shovelling reaction videos into my feed in order to keep me on the site. It's more about every site requiring authentication and more information than they need about my identity, which in turn, gets sold to third-parties or gets stolen in a breach. And then can be used to impersonate me, craft scams targeting me, etc. Agree though that recommendation algos are bad and over-used. They're designed to give the illusion that the system is curating content that you would like. An algorithm can't recommend something you would like. It hasn't sat down with you over countless dinners and nights out and got to know you; nor has it been off and read it's own books and seen movies on its own time. It's not going to drop off a worn copy of Wide Sargasso Sea because that's what you need to read right now. Recommendation algorithms are designed for retention and retention-only. They throw away almost all data about you except what you've clicked on recently.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Funny that you compare recommendation algorithms to a human being who knows you well. My purely anecdotal feeling is that today, recommending media (let alone a book, as fewer people today read) to a friend or relative is viewed as less appropriate than in the past. When people are facing a glut of content, and are well empowered to find on their own content that would appeal to them, someone saying “You really ought to check this out, I think you’d like it!” might be just as bothersome as friends or relatives trying to evangelize their religion or draft you into their MLM scheme.
  - alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
    To counterbalance your anecdote this is not among my friends and family. We swap books regularly and enjoy the recommendations. Of the prior 10 books I read all came from friend recommendation, and I enjoyed each one.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    What my friends think I may or may not enjoy is the only halfway reliable signal I have when it comes to identifying things new to me that I may or may not enjoy. I hope they never stop telling me about them.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mondobe 3y ago
> Let's be clear: the best targeted ads I will ever see are the ones I get from a search engine when it serves an ad for exactly the thing I was searching for. Everybody wins: I find what I wanted, the vendor helps me buy their thing, and the search engine gets paid for connecting us. I don't know anybody who complains about this sort of ad. It's a good ad. These ads are good in theory (and great when they work), but I find that, most of the time, they just result in me searching for one product and the first result being an ad for a competing product. > There's another kind of ad that works well on me. I play video games sometimes, and I use Steam, and sometimes I browse through games on Steam and star the ones I'm considering buying. Later, when those games go on sale, Steam emails me to tell me they are on sale, and sometimes then I buy them. Again, everybody wins: I got a game I wanted (at a discount!), the game maker gets paid, and Steam gets paid for connecting us. And I can disable the emails if I want, but I don't want, because they are good ads. This I totally agree with (though I might be biased, as a gamedev). These ads are awesome because I told Steam that I want these games and that I want ads about these games.
- gspencley 3y ago
  > This I totally agree with (though I might be biased, as a gamedev). These ads are awesome because I told Steam that I want these games and that I want ads about these games. I would only like this "feature" if I explicitly opt-in by clicking an "email me if this product goes on sale" button. Starring / adding to favourites etc. is not consent to send me an out of the blue notification. For all they know I've already bought the game somewhere else, or my interests have changed, or I don't play games anymore. I'm tired of technology trying to guess what I want. When they get it right it's creepy. When they get it wrong it's annoying. I also really hate "out of the blue" emails or notifications. My "aspergery" personality has a hard enough time dealing with texts from my family members. I'm in the habit of turning off all notifications off for everything. It just bothers me how often the defaults are "everything on."
  - michaelt 3y ago
    > I would only like this "feature" if I explicitly opt-in by clicking an "email me if this product goes on sale" button. Yes, this is how it works (which the article doesn't make especially clear). You add something to your 'steam wishlist' and steam e-mails you next time it goes on sale. As far as I'm aware, the wishlist has no other function. Of course, part of the reason this works is that a lot of sales are like 70% off - you'll get e-mailed when that $25 game on your wishlist is available for $7.50. There would be much less benefit to the consumer if they insisted on e-mailing me to tell me that $25 game had been discounted to $23.
mdip 3y ago
Something the author alluded to but didn't call out specifically is the "I'm already a customer" problem. I can only really speak to Amazon and Facebook (via the web) because my uBlock configuration nips almost everything else, completely[0], and most advertising from those sites, as well. But when an advertisement does slip through, it is frequently for a service I already subscribe to or a product I already purchased. In the latter case, I've had times where I've purchased something on Amazon and had the same product show up within a few minutes of the purchase as an advertisement on Facebook. So ... that was wasted marketing spend. On the flip side of that, I'm certain Amazon knows who my girlfriend is and correlates our searches. There have been a handful of times when I was discussing gift ideas and she'll pull up a product and hand me her phone[1]. Sure, they pick it up when she sends me a link from the app or does some other action that can be correlated (i.e. we're both on the same WiFi, our phones are both reporting the same location[2]) but it's happened enough that I've started paying attention. On one occasion, she handed me her phone, we had no other digital back/forth and my phone was charging in the car (off, because I let the battery die). Later that evening, I'm on my laptop and that product was on the home page. There are other explanations, sure, but it'd be pretty easy to see that we frequently share one of two IP addresses when visiting their sites and start tracking those accounts as affiliated in some way for gift-giving purposes. [0] I see product recommendations on Amazon and for some reason more than a few sponsored posts and the like on Facebook -- I don't use their mobile apps. [1] I really, really hate using mobile apps. [2] I don't actually know if the Amazon app tracks location ... I don't have it. // FWIW: I really did laugh out loud at "Statistical Astrology" and I'm positive I'll be using that statement in the future.
- softfalcon 3y ago
  The reason it sent that ad to you despite your phone being off and charging in the car is because the shadow profile has already linked you and your girlfriend together prior to your phone dying. Your phone does not have to be on anymore for you to see stuff your girlfriend looks at. Once they've made a statistical connection (and your phones keep regularly reporting from same IP for the foreseeable future) you will get the ads she looks at if they seem relevant to target to you as possible gifts/things-to-buy. I sat through a corporate "ads data pipeline" info-session from Google for my company. You do not want to know the level of architecture pumping away in the background that collects and correlates disparate data about you together. It's actually shocking how robust and complex it is. Trust me, I've seen it, they know almost everything about you consumption/location/device wise.
JohnMakin 3y ago
I'm glad this article mentioned Pandora - an oft-overlooked website that plays second or third fiddle to apple music and spotify, its recommendations have been surprisingly good and have been so for well over a decade now. It is one of the few entertainment subscription services I will always pay for unless some genius over there decides to ruin their algorithm with ML.
UglyToad 3y ago
It amazes me that these mega wealthy corporations don't understand uh... going abroad. Like I know it's not so common on the US but here if you pop across to France for a week you get ads for everything in French. Despite my best* efforts I still speak abysmal French. You're not going to sell me shit in French (or indeed anything anyway). I literally just crossed a border, I didn't become French, please. This despite me being pretty lazy and generally letting my data get slurped left, right and center. Perfect market efficiency strikes again... *Citation needed
- Zak 3y ago
  I've noticed Google's web properties are particularly bad about this. I'm logged into an account - they know what language I want my search results in because I told them in my account preferences, but if my IP geolocation says I'm in a different country, I must want the UI in the local language, right?
  - teachrdan 3y ago
    This used to be especially bad in Google Maps. Just because I'm in Japan doesn't mean that I, the US-ian logged into their English-language Google account, can suddenly read Japanese! If the Gmail UI is in Japanese I can probably muddle through. If train lines and street names are in kanji I'm probably effed. (Maps has since improved language detection.)
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  On the other side, I love every time I see a Spanish ad (I know only elementary school and restaurant menu-level Spanish) because it means I'm seeing fewer badly targeted English ads just because I do sometimes love watching Spanish language content with English subtitles. Spanish ads seem frequently less toxic to me. It's a bit of useful misinformation I'm happy to feed the ad targeting algorithms because I want them to have garbage about me. They are garbage-in/garbage-out in general anyway, but the more garbage I intentionally feed them, the happier I feel, because I'm still somewhat in control. I don't use an ad blocker, I'm okay with generic, untargeted ads. I do block a lot of advertising cookies and I am isolating them from each other in a cat and mouse game. Intentional misinformation is a fun part of that, too.
heresie-dabord 3y ago
> "Everyone loves collecting data, but nobody loves analyzing it later." Analysing oceans of telemetry is not just hard, it's exponential-volume * permutating-international-linguistic-complexity hard. The business model is therefore not to anything truly useful with useful data, the business model is fake it hard by hoarding the data to make money. If enough people believe that MAANG have real capability beyond non-semantic content correlation at scale, the money will (and does) accrue. Say "A.I." breathlessly. > chances are good that your pet ML application is an expensive replacement for a dumb heuristic The probability approaches 1. If the mere fact of holding data were put to a rigorous test, we would discover what everybody knows. [0] > See, the problem is there's almost no way to know if you're right. The dystopian truth is that it doesn't matter if the advertising empire is right or good or helpful. And the result is the grotesque coupling of what would otherwise be unequivocally brilliant technological advances: powerful mobile communication at scale and shared, connected, cultivated information. - - - [0] _ https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-everybody-knows-lyrics https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-everybody-knows-lyrics _ "Everybody knows the scene is dead, but there's going to be a meter on your bed that will expose... what everybody knows." -- L. Cohen, S. Robinson
- drdaeman 3y ago
  This. Companies still happily beat that dead horse and preach the beatings as the way to do things, simply because all their valuations are tied to the belief that Big Data is Big Money. For them, admitting it's not the case and "Google/Meta/... knows more about you than you do" is a myth/meme is committing suicide.
PaulHoule 3y ago
My take is I get better recommendations from YouTube if I am logged out.
- shapefrog 3y ago
  Perhaps I am a snob - but when I see the logged out YouTube feed I wonder what is wrong with humanity and where it went horribly wrong, have we already arrived at the Idiocracy depicted in 2006. If that is better than your logged in feed then it suggests you have lowest common denominator YouTube tastes; with all the open mouth thumbnails, pranks, $$$$$$$$ and pointless content houses.
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    Not that poster, but bring logged in with history "turned off" is truly better. Only your self-curated playlists inform the results (well, that and all the clickbait bullshit). Its honestly pretty great, even if you do sometimes lose videos never to find them again because you didn't save any history anywhere for yourself.
  - carbotaniuman 3y ago
    If doesn't have to be good, but sometimes if I click one wrong video and then leave (to go do something for instance), the algorithm will assume this is my new hyperfixation and I will have to just ignore my recommended at that point. It gets really bad with politics and news for instance, where I can watch one video on some topic and then suddenly YouTube decides to give me everyone and their mothers opinion.
  - npsimons 3y ago
    > Perhaps I am a snob - but when I see the logged out YouTube feed I wonder what is wrong with humanity and where it went horribly wrong, have we already arrived at the Idiocracy depicted in 2006. If that makes you a snob, then I am too. Similar with /r/popular versus my subscribed feed on Reddit. Both it and logged out YouTube are dumpster fires in my eyes. The logged in version of YouTube isn't much better, though - "oh, you clicked on this talk from the Strange Loop conference? Here's a video on introductory programming in Python!"
Mystery-Machine 3y ago
The author completely misses the second very important reason why someone might be against companies collecting sawths of personal data: government surveillance. There are more and more cases where individuals get their phones searched without permission, their internet browsing history spied on, etc. Articles like this "I don't care" really don't help. In fact, they only do damage.
- npsimons 3y ago
  Given the history of the writer of the blog post's (apenwarr) involvement in Debian, I highly doubt they missed that particular bugaboo. Mayhap he's just burned out by it at this point, or he's just stating the facts: there's not really anything anyone who cares can do do change it, so don't spend precious attention worrying about it.
hyperman1 3y ago
I live in a small country with multiple languages. Every site knows the country from the IP, and the language from my language headers. Even so, I don't think 10% of the ads I see give me something I can actually buy in my country, and in the correct language. Youtube is the worst. I get the same 2 ads every few minutes, for weeks, generally for things not applicable to me. The ad networks serve you whatever ads they happen to have laying around, and generally that's a 1 size fits all dumb generic thing. All those metrics exist not because they work, but so the marketeers can convince themselves and their bosses they are doing their job by shoving ads around. Nobody even has to look as long as the illusion someone is looking still holds.
- mike_hock 3y ago
  They exist so a global surveillance network can be built with ad companies as a front. Ads are perceived as a nuisance but benign and non-threatening. > so the marketeers can convince themselves and their bosses they are doing their job by shoving ads around That's highly plausible. Plausible deniability needs to be plausible.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    #conspiracy
    - mike_hock 3y ago
      It's more consistent with observations than the inefficient-advertisers hypothesis, which requires extra excuses to make it work, such as the one presented here: It doesn't work but ill-informed executives want it anyway. We would expect market forces to rout out advertising companies that need to charge extra to run a useless surveillance network that doesn't actually increase conversion rates.
      - hyperman1 3y ago
        We can be both 'right' and 'wrong' at the same time, because the world isn't absolute. Different interests apply their forces, push and pull. Sometimes their interests align. I have no problem believing advertisers lie to their bosses, they do it to everyone else and assuming they don't do it when their interests are served best of all is not an extra excuse. I have also no problem believing todays intelligences see a lovely buildup of information, and decide they want that pile to grow and they want access. Surely rich corporations see dollar signs selling access to this info, and every possible use of it must be looked at at every angle by teams of spindoctors andthink tanks. In fact, I can belizve Google and Facebook accidentally found out they sat on a mountain of info. While not the initial plan, they decided to use and grow it because why not. Undoubtly there are 100's more of these small stories. The world just goes on, and the human brain finds meaning in the complex random patterns that appear, self reinforce, and disappear again. The biggest illusion of all is there is a story to it. Some of us might be more powerfull than others, but no person or group is that influential on its own.
barrysteve 3y ago
I have no reason to believe that Netflix paid $1 million for a recommend algorithm and then threw it away. Many DARPA projects from the 1990s were "cancelled" and then mysteriously showed up fifteen years later. Either Netflix is lying about throwing it away, or we are supposed to believe a company that is fanatical about making money, to the degree of churning out 'sastificing' films and guiding users to them, is somehow also mr. butterfingers when it come to letting research grants slip through it's fingers and discarding the sucessful results.. Something smells fishy about this article. At what point do we admit tech companies don't operate for money and have their own private purposes?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > I have no reason to believe that Netflix paid $1 million for a recommend algorithm and then threw it away. I have no reason to doubt it, either. To companies the size of Netflix, $1 million is a lot of money -- but not that much money.
hoosieree 3y ago
> Netflix moved online, and the cost of a bad recommendation was much less This was the most interesting point for me. I found it surprising that changing the cost of delivering a movie could so dramatically shift company-wide priorities.
- npsimons 3y ago
  > I found it surprising that changing the cost of delivering a movie could so dramatically shift company-wide priorities. I mean, not to yell at clouds, but this is kind of how technology and our use of it progresses - things get faster/cheaper, and pretty soon you don't have to give a shit about pushing to EAX but instead just mapreduce across your cluster. We're inherently lazy.
  - hoosieree 3y ago
    Sure, but I tend to think of a cost reduction leading to doing more of your core business. I would not expect it to change the essence of how interact with your customers. Maybe I should not be so surprised. If some core service used in software becomes 1000x cheaper, it does tend to produce not just shifts in quantity but shifts in the kind of thing you do with it. For instance, if a language's garbage collector goes from annoyingly slow to basically invisible, it wouldn't be surprising for the preferred paradigm to change.
    - npsimons 3y ago
      > For instance, if a language's garbage collector goes from annoyingly slow to basically invisible, it wouldn't be surprising for the preferred paradigm to change. Funny you give that as an example - I recall attending a talk round the turn of the century about using Java in real-time systems, and a big stickler at the time was the GC. I haven't kept up with Java (or real-time systems), but given the inroads the JDK VM has made in the embedded space, I wouldn't be surprised at all if something changed enough to make the GC not an issue for (some) real-time systems any more.
laurex 3y ago
This talk by Tricia Wang along the same lines is worth a watch! The idea that we learn things by tracking or even with surveys leaves out the insights we get from actual human experience that's not purely quantifiable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaOUJa9fjXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaOUJa9fjXU
npsimons 3y ago
Netflix just ended their 25 year long DVD by mail service. I subscribed to it a good chunk of that time (it was comparatively cheap), but didn't use it much over the last decade, because I'll admit I'm a dopamine fiend who likes that quick fix. But: > Outliers are bad for business. That's pretty much the takeaway here. Art (or anything really) that inspires, or is even more than about one sigma out, is not profitable. Sure, it's what you want, and you want to be erudite and trying to fill that final level on Maslow's hierarchy, but that doesn't guarantee quarter after quarter ROI for shareholders.

75 points by kruuuder 3y ago

"The state of personalized recommendations is surprisingly terrible. At this point, the top recommendation is always a clickbait rage-creating article about movie stars or whatever Trump did or didn't do in the last 6 hours." "There's no magic here. If you use ML to teach a computer how to sort through resumes, it will recommend you interview people with male, white-sounding names, because it turns out that's what your HR department already does. If you ask it what video a person like you wants to see next, it will recommend some political propaganda crap, because 50% of the time 90% of the people do watch that next, because they can't help themselves, and that's a pretty good success rate."

karmakaze 3y ago
I realized that most recommendation systems are bad because they are optimized for the aggregate not the individual. I keep getting recommendations for recent popular content, because it will have high engagement for the masses. For everyone that isn't part of that mainstream, the system doesn't care about. Some recommendation systems that try to do better may fare better. As for ad-tech, if I'm getting ads for washer-dryers after a recent purchase, then they're counterproductive.
- jruohonen 3y ago
  True enough. Granted, as the article also mentioned (if I recall correctly), some recommender systems are actually quite good. For me, finding new music to listen from a particular genre fits into this category.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  "Engagement" is just code for addiction. They couldn't care less about personalizing content for our tastes. They want us constantly "engaging" with stuff. Scrolling all day on the apps. This maximizes the amount of advertising we see. Advertising is the root of all this evil.
- grotorea 3y ago
  > I realized that most recommendation systems are bad because they are optimized for the aggregate not the individual. That reminds me of something I'm not sure is the same, but maybe it is. Anyone also feels that a few years ago the Steam "related games" section switched from being not necessarily mainstream games that were actually similar to what you're looking at to being mostly whatever the most popular games that share any genre at all with the game on the page you're at?
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    Yes. Steam recommendations used to be absolutely superb. Now they're just "good," with a lot more "crap" baked in.
  - karmakaze 3y ago
    When I say 'optimized for the aggregate', that sounds like pleasing the most people most of the time, but what it often means is maximizing profit and not otherwise caring about users' experience.
- npsimons 3y ago
  > For everyone that isn't part of that mainstream, the system doesn't care about. The sad part is, this is exactly why I left broadcast radio and TV and movie theaters behind. With some heuristics and filters in place, this sort of thing was solvable online, but nope, the market beckons, pulling everyone ever forward into its gaping maw . . .

agentultra 3y ago

For ad targeting and recommendation algorithms, sure. "Privacy," though isn't about Google shovelling reaction videos into my feed in order to keep me on the site. It's more about every site requiring authentication and more information than they need about my identity, which in turn, gets sold to third-parties or gets stolen in a breach. And then can be used to impersonate me, craft scams targeting me, etc. Agree though that recommendation algos are bad and over-used. They're designed to give the illusion that the system is curating content that you would like. An algorithm can't recommend something you would like. It hasn't sat down with you over countless dinners and nights out and got to know you; nor has it been off and read it's own books and seen movies on its own time. It's not going to drop off a worn copy of Wide Sargasso Sea because that's what you need to read right now. Recommendation algorithms are designed for retention and retention-only. They throw away almost all data about you except what you've clicked on recently.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Funny that you compare recommendation algorithms to a human being who knows you well. My purely anecdotal feeling is that today, recommending media (let alone a book, as fewer people today read) to a friend or relative is viewed as less appropriate than in the past. When people are facing a glut of content, and are well empowered to find on their own content that would appeal to them, someone saying “You really ought to check this out, I think you’d like it!” might be just as bothersome as friends or relatives trying to evangelize their religion or draft you into their MLM scheme.
- alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
  To counterbalance your anecdote this is not among my friends and family. We swap books regularly and enjoy the recommendations. Of the prior 10 books I read all came from friend recommendation, and I enjoyed each one.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  What my friends think I may or may not enjoy is the only halfway reliable signal I have when it comes to identifying things new to me that I may or may not enjoy. I hope they never stop telling me about them.

deleted 3y ago

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mondobe 3y ago

> Let's be clear: the best targeted ads I will ever see are the ones I get from a search engine when it serves an ad for exactly the thing I was searching for. Everybody wins: I find what I wanted, the vendor helps me buy their thing, and the search engine gets paid for connecting us. I don't know anybody who complains about this sort of ad. It's a good ad. These ads are good in theory (and great when they work), but I find that, most of the time, they just result in me searching for one product and the first result being an ad for a competing product. > There's another kind of ad that works well on me. I play video games sometimes, and I use Steam, and sometimes I browse through games on Steam and star the ones I'm considering buying. Later, when those games go on sale, Steam emails me to tell me they are on sale, and sometimes then I buy them. Again, everybody wins: I got a game I wanted (at a discount!), the game maker gets paid, and Steam gets paid for connecting us. And I can disable the emails if I want, but I don't want, because they are good ads. This I totally agree with (though I might be biased, as a gamedev). These ads are awesome because I told Steam that I want these games and that I want ads about these games.

gspencley 3y ago
> This I totally agree with (though I might be biased, as a gamedev). These ads are awesome because I told Steam that I want these games and that I want ads about these games. I would only like this "feature" if I explicitly opt-in by clicking an "email me if this product goes on sale" button. Starring / adding to favourites etc. is not consent to send me an out of the blue notification. For all they know I've already bought the game somewhere else, or my interests have changed, or I don't play games anymore. I'm tired of technology trying to guess what I want. When they get it right it's creepy. When they get it wrong it's annoying. I also really hate "out of the blue" emails or notifications. My "aspergery" personality has a hard enough time dealing with texts from my family members. I'm in the habit of turning off all notifications off for everything. It just bothers me how often the defaults are "everything on."
- michaelt 3y ago
  > I would only like this "feature" if I explicitly opt-in by clicking an "email me if this product goes on sale" button. Yes, this is how it works (which the article doesn't make especially clear). You add something to your 'steam wishlist' and steam e-mails you next time it goes on sale. As far as I'm aware, the wishlist has no other function. Of course, part of the reason this works is that a lot of sales are like 70% off - you'll get e-mailed when that $25 game on your wishlist is available for $7.50. There would be much less benefit to the consumer if they insisted on e-mailing me to tell me that $25 game had been discounted to $23.

mdip 3y ago

Something the author alluded to but didn't call out specifically is the "I'm already a customer" problem. I can only really speak to Amazon and Facebook (via the web) because my uBlock configuration nips almost everything else, completely[0], and most advertising from those sites, as well. But when an advertisement does slip through, it is frequently for a service I already subscribe to or a product I already purchased. In the latter case, I've had times where I've purchased something on Amazon and had the same product show up within a few minutes of the purchase as an advertisement on Facebook. So ... that was wasted marketing spend. On the flip side of that, I'm certain Amazon knows who my girlfriend is and correlates our searches. There have been a handful of times when I was discussing gift ideas and she'll pull up a product and hand me her phone[1]. Sure, they pick it up when she sends me a link from the app or does some other action that can be correlated (i.e. we're both on the same WiFi, our phones are both reporting the same location[2]) but it's happened enough that I've started paying attention. On one occasion, she handed me her phone, we had no other digital back/forth and my phone was charging in the car (off, because I let the battery die). Later that evening, I'm on my laptop and that product was on the home page. There are other explanations, sure, but it'd be pretty easy to see that we frequently share one of two IP addresses when visiting their sites and start tracking those accounts as affiliated in some way for gift-giving purposes. [0] I see product recommendations on Amazon and for some reason more than a few sponsored posts and the like on Facebook -- I don't use their mobile apps. [1] I really, really hate using mobile apps. [2] I don't actually know if the Amazon app tracks location ... I don't have it. // FWIW: I really did laugh out loud at "Statistical Astrology" and I'm positive I'll be using that statement in the future.

softfalcon 3y ago
The reason it sent that ad to you despite your phone being off and charging in the car is because the shadow profile has already linked you and your girlfriend together prior to your phone dying. Your phone does not have to be on anymore for you to see stuff your girlfriend looks at. Once they've made a statistical connection (and your phones keep regularly reporting from same IP for the foreseeable future) you will get the ads she looks at if they seem relevant to target to you as possible gifts/things-to-buy. I sat through a corporate "ads data pipeline" info-session from Google for my company. You do not want to know the level of architecture pumping away in the background that collects and correlates disparate data about you together. It's actually shocking how robust and complex it is. Trust me, I've seen it, they know almost everything about you consumption/location/device wise.

JohnMakin 3y ago

I'm glad this article mentioned Pandora - an oft-overlooked website that plays second or third fiddle to apple music and spotify, its recommendations have been surprisingly good and have been so for well over a decade now. It is one of the few entertainment subscription services I will always pay for unless some genius over there decides to ruin their algorithm with ML.

UglyToad 3y ago

It amazes me that these mega wealthy corporations don't understand uh... going abroad. Like I know it's not so common on the US but here if you pop across to France for a week you get ads for everything in French. Despite my best* efforts I still speak abysmal French. You're not going to sell me shit in French (or indeed anything anyway). I literally just crossed a border, I didn't become French, please. This despite me being pretty lazy and generally letting my data get slurped left, right and center. Perfect market efficiency strikes again... *Citation needed

Zak 3y ago
I've noticed Google's web properties are particularly bad about this. I'm logged into an account - they know what language I want my search results in because I told them in my account preferences, but if my IP geolocation says I'm in a different country, I must want the UI in the local language, right?
- teachrdan 3y ago
  This used to be especially bad in Google Maps. Just because I'm in Japan doesn't mean that I, the US-ian logged into their English-language Google account, can suddenly read Japanese! If the Gmail UI is in Japanese I can probably muddle through. If train lines and street names are in kanji I'm probably effed. (Maps has since improved language detection.)
WorldMaker 3y ago
On the other side, I love every time I see a Spanish ad (I know only elementary school and restaurant menu-level Spanish) because it means I'm seeing fewer badly targeted English ads just because I do sometimes love watching Spanish language content with English subtitles. Spanish ads seem frequently less toxic to me. It's a bit of useful misinformation I'm happy to feed the ad targeting algorithms because I want them to have garbage about me. They are garbage-in/garbage-out in general anyway, but the more garbage I intentionally feed them, the happier I feel, because I'm still somewhat in control. I don't use an ad blocker, I'm okay with generic, untargeted ads. I do block a lot of advertising cookies and I am isolating them from each other in a cat and mouse game. Intentional misinformation is a fun part of that, too.

heresie-dabord 3y ago

> "Everyone loves collecting data, but nobody loves analyzing it later." Analysing oceans of telemetry is not just hard, it's exponential-volume * permutating-international-linguistic-complexity hard. The business model is therefore not to anything truly useful with useful data, the business model is fake it hard by hoarding the data to make money. If enough people believe that MAANG have real capability beyond non-semantic content correlation at scale, the money will (and does) accrue. Say "A.I." breathlessly. > chances are good that your pet ML application is an expensive replacement for a dumb heuristic The probability approaches 1. If the mere fact of holding data were put to a rigorous test, we would discover what everybody knows. [0] > See, the problem is there's almost no way to know if you're right. The dystopian truth is that it doesn't matter if the advertising empire is right or good or helpful. And the result is the grotesque coupling of what would otherwise be unequivocally brilliant technological advances: powerful mobile communication at scale and shared, connected, cultivated information. - - - [0] _ https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-everybody-knows-lyrics https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-everybody-knows-lyrics _ "Everybody knows the scene is dead, but there's going to be a meter on your bed that will expose... what everybody knows." -- L. Cohen, S. Robinson

drdaeman 3y ago
This. Companies still happily beat that dead horse and preach the beatings as the way to do things, simply because all their valuations are tied to the belief that Big Data is Big Money. For them, admitting it's not the case and "Google/Meta/... knows more about you than you do" is a myth/meme is committing suicide.

PaulHoule 3y ago

My take is I get better recommendations from YouTube if I am logged out.

shapefrog 3y ago
Perhaps I am a snob - but when I see the logged out YouTube feed I wonder what is wrong with humanity and where it went horribly wrong, have we already arrived at the Idiocracy depicted in 2006. If that is better than your logged in feed then it suggests you have lowest common denominator YouTube tastes; with all the open mouth thumbnails, pranks, $$$$$$$$ and pointless content houses.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  Not that poster, but bring logged in with history "turned off" is truly better. Only your self-curated playlists inform the results (well, that and all the clickbait bullshit). Its honestly pretty great, even if you do sometimes lose videos never to find them again because you didn't save any history anywhere for yourself.
- carbotaniuman 3y ago
  If doesn't have to be good, but sometimes if I click one wrong video and then leave (to go do something for instance), the algorithm will assume this is my new hyperfixation and I will have to just ignore my recommended at that point. It gets really bad with politics and news for instance, where I can watch one video on some topic and then suddenly YouTube decides to give me everyone and their mothers opinion.
- npsimons 3y ago
  > Perhaps I am a snob - but when I see the logged out YouTube feed I wonder what is wrong with humanity and where it went horribly wrong, have we already arrived at the Idiocracy depicted in 2006. If that makes you a snob, then I am too. Similar with /r/popular versus my subscribed feed on Reddit. Both it and logged out YouTube are dumpster fires in my eyes. The logged in version of YouTube isn't much better, though - "oh, you clicked on this talk from the Strange Loop conference? Here's a video on introductory programming in Python!"

Mystery-Machine 3y ago

The author completely misses the second very important reason why someone might be against companies collecting sawths of personal data: government surveillance. There are more and more cases where individuals get their phones searched without permission, their internet browsing history spied on, etc. Articles like this "I don't care" really don't help. In fact, they only do damage.

npsimons 3y ago
Given the history of the writer of the blog post's (apenwarr) involvement in Debian, I highly doubt they missed that particular bugaboo. Mayhap he's just burned out by it at this point, or he's just stating the facts: there's not really anything anyone who cares can do do change it, so don't spend precious attention worrying about it.

hyperman1 3y ago

I live in a small country with multiple languages. Every site knows the country from the IP, and the language from my language headers. Even so, I don't think 10% of the ads I see give me something I can actually buy in my country, and in the correct language. Youtube is the worst. I get the same 2 ads every few minutes, for weeks, generally for things not applicable to me. The ad networks serve you whatever ads they happen to have laying around, and generally that's a 1 size fits all dumb generic thing. All those metrics exist not because they work, but so the marketeers can convince themselves and their bosses they are doing their job by shoving ads around. Nobody even has to look as long as the illusion someone is looking still holds.

mike_hock 3y ago
They exist so a global surveillance network can be built with ad companies as a front. Ads are perceived as a nuisance but benign and non-threatening. > so the marketeers can convince themselves and their bosses they are doing their job by shoving ads around That's highly plausible. Plausible deniability needs to be plausible.
- fomine3 3y ago
  #conspiracy
  - mike_hock 3y ago
    It's more consistent with observations than the inefficient-advertisers hypothesis, which requires extra excuses to make it work, such as the one presented here: It doesn't work but ill-informed executives want it anyway. We would expect market forces to rout out advertising companies that need to charge extra to run a useless surveillance network that doesn't actually increase conversion rates.
    - hyperman1 3y ago
      We can be both 'right' and 'wrong' at the same time, because the world isn't absolute. Different interests apply their forces, push and pull. Sometimes their interests align. I have no problem believing advertisers lie to their bosses, they do it to everyone else and assuming they don't do it when their interests are served best of all is not an extra excuse. I have also no problem believing todays intelligences see a lovely buildup of information, and decide they want that pile to grow and they want access. Surely rich corporations see dollar signs selling access to this info, and every possible use of it must be looked at at every angle by teams of spindoctors andthink tanks. In fact, I can belizve Google and Facebook accidentally found out they sat on a mountain of info. While not the initial plan, they decided to use and grow it because why not. Undoubtly there are 100's more of these small stories. The world just goes on, and the human brain finds meaning in the complex random patterns that appear, self reinforce, and disappear again. The biggest illusion of all is there is a story to it. Some of us might be more powerfull than others, but no person or group is that influential on its own.

barrysteve 3y ago

I have no reason to believe that Netflix paid $1 million for a recommend algorithm and then threw it away. Many DARPA projects from the 1990s were "cancelled" and then mysteriously showed up fifteen years later. Either Netflix is lying about throwing it away, or we are supposed to believe a company that is fanatical about making money, to the degree of churning out 'sastificing' films and guiding users to them, is somehow also mr. butterfingers when it come to letting research grants slip through it's fingers and discarding the sucessful results.. Something smells fishy about this article. At what point do we admit tech companies don't operate for money and have their own private purposes?

JohnFen 3y ago
> I have no reason to believe that Netflix paid $1 million for a recommend algorithm and then threw it away. I have no reason to doubt it, either. To companies the size of Netflix, $1 million is a lot of money -- but not that much money.

hoosieree 3y ago

> Netflix moved online, and the cost of a bad recommendation was much less This was the most interesting point for me. I found it surprising that changing the cost of delivering a movie could so dramatically shift company-wide priorities.

npsimons 3y ago
> I found it surprising that changing the cost of delivering a movie could so dramatically shift company-wide priorities. I mean, not to yell at clouds, but this is kind of how technology and our use of it progresses - things get faster/cheaper, and pretty soon you don't have to give a shit about pushing to EAX but instead just mapreduce across your cluster. We're inherently lazy.
- hoosieree 3y ago
  Sure, but I tend to think of a cost reduction leading to doing more of your core business. I would not expect it to change the essence of how interact with your customers. Maybe I should not be so surprised. If some core service used in software becomes 1000x cheaper, it does tend to produce not just shifts in quantity but shifts in the kind of thing you do with it. For instance, if a language's garbage collector goes from annoyingly slow to basically invisible, it wouldn't be surprising for the preferred paradigm to change.
  - npsimons 3y ago
    > For instance, if a language's garbage collector goes from annoyingly slow to basically invisible, it wouldn't be surprising for the preferred paradigm to change. Funny you give that as an example - I recall attending a talk round the turn of the century about using Java in real-time systems, and a big stickler at the time was the GC. I haven't kept up with Java (or real-time systems), but given the inroads the JDK VM has made in the embedded space, I wouldn't be surprised at all if something changed enough to make the GC not an issue for (some) real-time systems any more.

laurex 3y ago

This talk by Tricia Wang along the same lines is worth a watch! The idea that we learn things by tracking or even with surveys leaves out the insights we get from actual human experience that's not purely quantifiable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaOUJa9fjXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaOUJa9fjXU

npsimons 3y ago

Netflix just ended their 25 year long DVD by mail service. I subscribed to it a good chunk of that time (it was comparatively cheap), but didn't use it much over the last decade, because I'll admit I'm a dopamine fiend who likes that quick fix. But: > Outliers are bad for business. That's pretty much the takeaway here. Art (or anything really) that inspires, or is even more than about one sigma out, is not profitable. Sure, it's what you want, and you want to be erudite and trying to fill that final level on Maslow's hierarchy, but that doesn't guarantee quarter after quarter ROI for shareholders.