Posted by freetonik 3 days ago
Amazon keeps recommending me sequel to books I never finished (which they know as on kindle it tracks how many page you read), or books I gave 1 star reviews to.
I often scream at my Kindle/Audible app: "My brother, you know I hate that series and gave it a 1 star why do you keep recommeding it?"
And I have to go thru crappy Goodreads lists to find an interesting book
They're incentivised to get money for showing you ads for what you plausibly might want, for the lowest cost possible.
Also if you buy one thing and the algorithms go "finally! Some signal" you're doing pretty good on the hiding.
Yet they don't freaking get it. Google has not discovered that I do not like ads. Advertising (mostly) doesn't work on me. I don't buy the shit that is advertised to me. Sometimes, it's the absolute opposite.
...and yet, on the one device I haven't got an ad blocker on, they insist on showing me ads for stuff I WILL NOT BUY. (one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years--no, no no).
I just don't get it. They expect me to pay for YouTube premium or something, I don't know. I won't pay them.
Google bought my 30s and now they just can't help but nickle-and-dime my mind from here to eternity. It's kind of infuriating. They don't need to know more about me. What they do know about me should be enough!
If you still work for Google I recommend reading privacy design docs for random large scale services if you're able. It's very telling what the priorities are.
And I agree that they mostly don't want to be Palantir-like. They mostly don't care about people. They care about advertisers. Any new targeting mechanism they can offer advertisers they absolutely will. The problem is they sit on a gold mine of very, very sensitive personal data (most of it "anonymized"). Most of it can be de-anonymized with little work. Worse, they will absolutely cough it up to the government when required. They also have a lot of motivated engineers thinking of ways to try to use said data to "improve products". Like the whole saga of doing activity inference for Android users. You don't even want to know about how stupid and creepy that is/was.
"one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years"
And the one time you need some random specific insurance, what are you going to think about?