I wish tech companies knew more about me

Same here.

I think the songs get pushed by who pays to push, and most of those songs have vocals.

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.

- People who know you very well (friends, family, spouse) often buy you bad gifts you need to pretend to be happy to receive.

- Ultimately, advertisers aren't _merely_ trying to find things you want. They're trying to get you to buy _their_ things. So someone selling (let's say) hamburgers might be savvy enough to avoid vegetarians, but after that how would they possibly narrow it down? Not everyone wants to try out a new burger place, or even cares about advertising when it comes to restaurant suggestions.

ie, they're trying to coerce you into wanting their products, and no amount of targeting can really fix that problem. Also, targeting is difficult.

I just disabled my adblocker on the BBC website out of curiosity and oh am I happy I don't live like this.

Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought is kind of a separate issue, because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon) and surely is so easy to avoid I find it bizarre that it still happens in this day and age.

As an aside, there is exactly one place on earth where I will actively look around for ads, and that is London Underground stations. Because for whatever reason they advertise a lot of cultural events (concerts, festivals, plays, etc).

Guys, if I buy a photo camera, I might want lenses, or a cleaning kit, or maybe a camera bag. But I'm almost certainly not interested in starting a camera collection, nor am I interested in incompatible brands to what I just bought.

It shouldn't be so hard to run some stats and figure out that there's things one doesn't buy again often, like washing machines, cameras, laptops and other big purchases.

Also, search still sucks. Searching for things like sizes where fuzzy ranges are involved is pain. Like I need to find a recessed light that fits into a 100mm hole, it's a pain to search for still. At this point I think somebody at Amazon could have come up with a way to categorize products and extract parameters automatically. And the pain only increases exponentially if you need 3-4 things in a product to match.

ChatGPT can do it, no reason why Amazon couldn't just have that on their page.

* I purchase something and all the recommended products become the thing I just purchased for the next month.

* I do an operation in 3D modeling software that can be applied in 2 directions, it always chooses to apply it in the direction that makes no sense.

* I get recommendations in my social media feeds for what to do in a certain city for 2 months after I already visited and returned home.

* I click on a link to a song, listen for 10 seconds and turn it off because its a genre I don't like, too bad, that is what the algorithm thinks I'm exclusively into now (related, right now I'm struggling with Tidal recommending Swedish language songs because a band I recently discovered is Swedish despite singing in English).

Maybe I don't notice when the computer gets it right most of the time, but it really feels like it gets it wrong more than it gets it right. It also feels like this continually gets worse, when software should be getting smarter at predicting what a user wants. Is it unreasonable to expect that my computer can see that I did the same operation on something twice in a row and that maybe it should prompt me to do it on the rest of the data in the same location?

A small storefront business I liked closed up over the summer. Literally nothing to do with tech other than they had a website, flat HTML that hadn't been touched in years, to solicit business. They communicated with me and their other customers by SMS, almost exclusively.

I talked to one of the core employees and asked why they were closing. Business was drying up, the usual story of business headwinds but among the reasons business was drying up was they couldn't make money by running ads, the cost of running the ads these days meant they would barely break even on the average customer they acquired at the historical customer acquisition rates.

I don't buy ads myself but the sense they shared was the like the locksmith and plumber experience, except as seen from the other side. Maybe it's different in other parts of the world but the experience is 1000s of ads for indistinguishable fly-by-night-looking operations all of which seemingly lead to the same call centers. Dispatching nearly-faceless vans from who knows where and a different junior-ish guy or gal shows up each time, looks dazed, does an average job and hustles off to the next one.

advertisers are.

you use adblocker. you're persona non grata to begin with. your purchases are not mapped back, that's why you keep seeing the stuff you just bought. for them, you are top of the funnel still. AdBlockers work! (20yrs in adtech)

for music, you're also irrelevant. you're old. music industry doesn't care about 25+ finding new music. they spend all their effort on keeping teenagers in a comfortable bubble to mine them for music purchases and shows. people under 25 spend pretty much all the money record labels make.

anyway, the system works and they do know everything about you. but your goals and desires are completely irrelevant to everyone involved money changing hands.

Basically: capture everything I'm putting out and use it to help me.

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.

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".

Can the advertiser (as in "the company paying for the ad") get any of those signals ("we're paying for ads, but they're being shown to randos who are never going to by our products") ?

Or are the online ads so cheap that they don't care ?

You can be certain that they are using that data. The truth is that the data being collected about you is not intended to benefit you, it's being gathered and stored and sold to be used against you in any way that the person with that data feels might be an advantage for them.

It's not really about showing you relevant ads, or helpful recommendations, or useful product offerings. It hasn't been about any of those things for a very long time now. Your data will still be used that way, but while companies will tell you that is mainly why they collect your data that is a lie. Those are secondary uses for your data and making those things work well for your benefit is a cost to the companies and they are only willing to invest so much time/money/effort into that.

Your data is being used mostly for their benefit at your expense, and where it isn't being used today, it's being stored for a time in the future when it can be used more effectively against you. AI promises to make it easier than ever to trawl through all that data and find ways to leverage it to better manipulate you, or take more of your money from you, or further limit any possible risk you might expose a company to.

Companies don't want you to be aware of when and how that data is being used, so it's natural for you to feel like it's all being ignored, but you can sure that a lot of work is going into finding new and creative ways to put all that data to use.

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.

Adobe and Lenovo are really good at this.

If I buy toilet paper and a toilet seat I’m not going to be buying another seat next month. I don’t use them up like that.

Always surprises me that Amazon hasn’t managed to incorporate that into their algo

However:

a) I don't want better-targeted ads or more convenient infinite recommendation algorithms because they create friction that preserves some intentionality in my media consumption.

b) there's some survivorship bias here. We notice the bad things because they stand out, but not all of the machine-recommended things that we unquestioningly accept.

I think it'd be a great opportunity for someone to make an ad network where the user can type in things about themselves in an ad space. Randomly targeted questions and then we get ads perhaps around that. Ads that start off about current events in a fun way and give users an opportunity to feel like they have control in what they see. I know users would abuse it but I think that'd add value to the interaction. If I didn't want toilet seats but I write that I do it'd be valuable to an ad network to see how users interact with their preferences. I'm sure we'll say google already sort of does this but I disagree. I think google infers based on our traffic. Some sites I visit I don't necessary want to but am forced to. I'd love to see ads or have the option to even pay for things I want to see like pictures of my kids instead of an ad.

I could probably get something pretty decent going if Youtube would give me access to some buttons that actually give their algorithm signals directly. Subscribing and watching every video should be a pretty strong signal. Subscribing and only watching videos with a certain subtitle should be a signal of what videos on that channel I like. There should be a 'channels I don't really care for' bucket, that it might still show me videos from if it's doing exceptionally well. But giving users these tools isn't in the interest of Youtube, so they never will.

I do much better after switching to FreeTube as a front-end for Youtube, since now I'll only be shown videos from people I subscribe to, and I can be on my own to find videos I actually want to watch. If only Youtube search wasn't hot garbage, I might actually see success more often than I do now.

Subject: 6MONTHS OF'COVERA.GE'START.ING.AT $2

From: RR_BANKAI.NET.bankai.NET.MCK.NET.MCK.NET.MCK.NET.RR_BANKAIdb@ad288.com

In contrast go try out a Chinese social media such as Rednote, and the recommendation algorithm is creepily good at displaying that it knows what content you like. Yes it does feel creepy. But in this case I wanted it to know my interests.

coz targeted ads as in op - only one party has benefited so far - people running the ad exchanges.

I lived in Germany for years but don't speak German. I raised a support ticket with Spotify to ask that they stop sending me emails in German, as they full-well know I speak English (the Spotify UI, thankfully, is in English). They declined. I sent their emails to spam.

Amazon is the same. I ended up just not using them, because it was so painful getting their site to talk to me in a language I understand.

And, as TFA points out, we have a mechanism for this: the browser passes a preferred locale to the server. It's simply a matter of the server respecting this and not assuming that everyone who happens to have a German IP address speaks German, which is blatantly not true.

That works pretty well but me just constantly telling it to grep manually is a bit underwhelming as far as UX goes.

Amazon used to be better at targeted advertising than it is now. I used to browse for a few things on Amazon, then go do something else, content with the knowledge that they'll do the hard work of figuring out what is actually a good recommendation for it. For a few years, this strategy helped me buy tools, light fixtures, and other things I used around the farm.

I'm not sure when it stopped, but it definitely did.

Ultimately, it's probably just a lot more compute than it's worth. They can probably spend $1 in compute to drive $10 in sales with dumb ads or they can spend $2 to drive $15 with smart ads. It's a diminishing returns thing and they drew the line such that I get dumb ads. Maybe folks that buy more, higher priced items get better ads.

You are not their client. And never been. And will never be.

Banks, credit unions, advertisers, insurance companies and the local and federal police. That's some of their clients.

But for a while not too long ago, like for one year until last summer I regularly used Instagram, and almost all ads were directly targeted at my interests and they directed me to local events and concerts and products and what not.

When I'm looking to purchase an item, it would be nice to get relevant ads for the kind of specs I'm looking for but like the blogger said, why do I care about getting ads for something I just purchased?

There are some remotes that can be programmed to automatically send a "select this" code I think, to automate having to do this every time (was researching something like this recently so just mentioning I think it exists, don't know a lot about it)

Spotify, Instagram, all those others, it's like the button ENCOURAGES them.

I also stopped getting ads years ago, but it was the same story. Car Ads. I hate cars, I have made it as clear as possible on multiple occasions. Sidebar ads never learn. Amazon never learns. And I bet they keep trying to show me cars to this day.

Now I am totally opposite, more unrelated the ads easier they are to ignore. If I start seeing related ads in feed (e.g. twitter), I try options provided by platforms to change those ads ('don't like this ad' etc)

In the sense that you aren’t able to build an immune system against it.

Why would you think that companies want to use this information for your good?

I don't think that they care. Orders of magnitude more resources are poured into A/B retention testing than to user's actual quality of life improvement

Programmers :-D

But most of us want it legally mandated as an opt-in with explicit consent.

"I wish the farmer knew more about me, it gives me corn but what I want is sunlight !"

> I'm so jealous of my son because he's 5 years old and they've been collecting all this data on him since he was in the womb and by the time he's my age he's going to have a much better customer experience than I'll ever get

Sounds impossible to figure out.

Like - I just purchased some plants from Dibleys, a plant nursery in UK. I've gotten confirmation email to my gmail account. Now I'm served plant ads for that very same company. I'd expect that The Algorithm would be smart to decide "hey, here is a guy that is interested in plants, let's take a look at other people in his age group and occupation, what are they also interested in, and let's serve him ads for that. Or having failed that ads for other plant nurseries in UK". But no! It's astounding, that it's so utterly mindlessly stupid.

But you know what, actually I prefer that there's no computational effort here. Maybe this means that me being served a shitty ad for a company I like and already know will not attribute to global warming. Maybe this means that Dibleys isn't being charged for a clickthrough, but for impressions that cost a lot less. Maybe this cyclical stupidity is something that we're stuck with as a human race, because why the fuck should an ad serve some kind of purpose.

That time where all the ads I got for months were ads for ridiculously expensive servers, after I had (out of curiosity) googled for "what is the most expensive server you can buy on ebay?"

Or the time when all I got was ads for military-grade cables and connectors for months, after having googled (out of curiosity) for something or another about submarines -- most likely something about the dud submarines that the UK had sold to the Canadian government.

Actually they have and they use it to charge advertisers who want to target you.

Hope this helps and reassures you! Now get back to the trough, piggy! And don't complain about the taste again!

You are the product!

The ad-example with the ovens/AEG appliances could also be designed for someone who recently moved in to a new home. But nevertheless, point of the OP is still valid.

i went to bed and opened youtube. guess what, there it was again.

I think that in theory, advertising based monetization is fine, but practically speaking, the incentives are so terrible that it invariably leads to bad outcomes. The reality of our ad-supported web is unsustainable and unacceptable and it needs to die. This does mean that lots of things will go away, and that we will be paying for a lot more things, but that's far preferable to the current state of the internet.

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

So, you are protected by the GDPR. There are some types of tracking that are just forbidden or very difficult to implement inside the law.

If you want to stop thinking and let companies decide what is the best for you, your problem is not lack of tracking. Trusting that big corporations will have your best interested in mind seems an odd believe to have in this day and age.

The thing about the language in websites is different. Most websites are created to be used locally. So, they conflagrate language, residence, currencies, etc. It has nothing to do with tracking.

Mastodon was my main source of doom-scrolling, but I got sick of the endless stream of posts about US politics and posts about Mastodon not having an algorithm, so I decided to give BlueSky a go, and climb back into my filter bubble, but it's even worse. Just an endless stream of people reporting US pol happenings at each other - unsourced - using screenshots of multicoloured block-letters.

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.

Advertisers aren't incentivised to show you ads for what you actually want. They're incentivised to get money for showing you ads for what you plausibly might want, for the lowest cost possible.

And if you buy one thing and the algorithms go "finally! Some signal" you should be happy - it means you're hiding from them quite well.

Any "discovery" algorithm that shows you a wildly varying set of things is still mostly in explore mode. And if they're easy to tune out and swat away you can be grateful.

I do not want ads matching my weaknesses and likely to convince me to buy anything.

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.

The advertising ecosystem is bad and broken in both directions within the dimensions of what they know, how much they know and in how they leverage it.

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!

I feel sorry for the company - obviously, Google hasn't been able to place those ads because its such a niche product and need. So once they "got a live one", they started serving me this company's ads *everywhere* (and I research and browse a *lot*).

I'm pretty sure I was perhaps the only target of their entire ad budget for the month - I was literally served ads for this tiny company *thousands* of times.

Note that only Google gained here - the ads didn't make me any more likely to buy a product I already knew about (and won't need for months in any case), and they did nothing to actually help the company reach more potential buyers. But the ad inventory was placed, and no doubt, each superfluous impression dutifully billed for...

"if you take a look at most systems, they are almost all broken and no one has much control over them. I can't send a sales inquiry, let alone a tech support request through a 'contact us' form most of the time, why would I believe that what I typed into a form would somehow reach an all-seeing panopticon?

Even if it's collected, I'd assume no one is looking at it, and many court dockets demonstrate stuff like this, while you routinely see cases where criminals or school shooters are caught, you also see cases of crimes that occur, but there's like 3 months of chat history where the dude was speaking in crazyish about purging the world and offing themselves."

I'll add that there's a lot of laws where the disclosure of information is mandated, but in that case the workload becomes so high that it's very unlikely someone will sift through it. Like financial information sharing between countries or between business and Tax Collection Entities. Sure every transaction above X amount gets sent to the other country or to the IRS, but considering that you have to pay high hourly fees to your accountant to go through your transactions, why would someone else go through them for free?

Amazon surely have some ofthe best engineers in the world, and it's surprisng they can't figure out this problem. No, now that I have purchased a fridge, I don't want to buy a second fridge.

Other daily metrics like from Instagram, etc are not very monetizable as, like great, you know I sometimes doom scroll through Korean pole dancer accounts, etc. What exactly does that help with?