- 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.
That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough". Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, there isn't really a lot of meaningful competition in the ad space driving superior targeting. It's more about having the killer network, the list of effective channels (search, youtube, instagram whatever) that is the big players advantage rather than their targeting skills.
Agreed wholeheartedly, and this is an important point: advertisers don't really lose much by showing you ads you don't want, so it's unlikely the system would ever become ultra-precise.
Im not sure if you mean “coerce” literally but if so this is overkill. Maybe “persuade” or to be more critical, “manipulate”?
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.
Programmers :-D
Adobe and Lenovo are really good at this.
"I wish the farmer knew more about me, it gives me corn but what I want is sunlight !"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?