Posted by freetonik 3 days ago
I keep my Firefox on mobile (with ublock origin) not logged into my google account. Every second search result since forever I need to add work "english" to it, clearly just english search words are not enough to convince it to give me english-speaking results, all is in german. Sometimes, even that word doesn't switch it.
Its pretty pathetic for otherwise stellar tech company of such scale, and since we are in 2026 clearly not a priority for anybody.
But I hate it when they suggest things that I don't want.. show me stuff I have already bought.... show me things I already decided against... show me stuff that is not in my price range. That's annoying. I don't mind a good, paid recommendation. I just don't like all the bad recommendations.
Any kind of "proactive" behavior on the part of the computer is unwelcome. If I don't command it, I don't expect my computer to do it. This includes ads but it also includes recommendations, and notifications, and "you should do this!" and "try that app!" and everything else modern computers are now throwing at us.
We need to get back to the user being in the driver's seat.
But I have never heard of them passing it on to whatever 3rd party trackers they have on their sites. THAT would be a privacy violation.
I'm not sure if that's true, but that's the theory.
That's just stupid.
You know, I had a really long argument about a decade ago with an Amazon senior engineer on the ads side of things about this. I was complaining about repeatedly being shown ads for the same blender I had just purchased (not accessories, not competing products, the exact same blender). And I hit a brick wall of "everybody complains about this, and we've been trying to change this, but every change to this makes the metrics worse".
It is just the curse of naive AB testing. Same stuff happens with apps like Duolingo where it is optimized e2e, not personalized, and then they behave as if their approach is sane.
This does not require more tracking. This requires LESS tracking - just show the language explicitly requested by the user.
> Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.
This does not require more tracking. Just dont show the screen if there is only one user.
Adobe and Lenovo are really good at this.
If you have bought them recently, they are the most unlikely things to buy in the near future.
I was actually surprised a few days ago when I have seen for the first time in many years a personalized ad that was useful. When I visited an on-line shop, I was greeted with a message that a product at which I have looked during a previous visit, but which I have not bought, has a 20% price reduction, and at the new price I was indeed interested to buy it.
This kind of notification, about a price reduction, makes sense, but ads for products to which I have looked previously and nothing has changed about them do not achieve any useful purpose. If I bought them I have no need to buy them again, if I did not buy them, this means that I decided that I do not need or want them, so I will not buy them regardless if I see ads for them.
I used to work at a big ad company and went and read about this once. Turns out the opposite is true (in general, maybe not for you specifically).
People are really likely to rebuy things. I’m not really sure why, but the numbers don’t lie. Gifts maybe?
Time consuming research (starting with filtering out advertising budget powered fake reviews) and short-lived products & brands make personal experience & recommendations a lot more useful. If someone around me has an even remotely similar set of requirements and budget for a product, they are much more likely better off trusting my recommendation and (having me) order another one right away. It used to be less clustered around one person or calendar date, when brands stayed around and kept true to their previous performance for longer. Nowadays I even order duplicates for myself, not because I really need 3 of them in the near-term future, but because I am worried that I will want a replacement in a year and another one the year after.. and I won't find exactly the same then.
The UX stuff is pretty obvious. Probably comes down to the time and money involved in implementing and maintaining something better. An engineering problem. The airline stuff is likely an architecture problem. Airlines are notorious for running ancient systems (Windows XP, floppy disks). I’d bet the information is there somewhere, just scattered across a bunch of poorly integrated systems.
Like it or not, AI will probably improve a lot of this. As behavioral analysis and AI-generated customer profiles become more common, these systems will get better at figuring out what you actually want. I wouldn’t be surprised to see advertisers running small models built around individual customers and their behavior. You’ll basically just be a vector in some advertising model. The ads will probably be more relevant, but I’m not sure we’ll be thrilled about how much they know about us.