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Amazon’s recommendations are getting a little too creepy
(www.vox.com)
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this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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There was a article years ago. A young woman started getting Target coupons for diapers and baby formula. A few weeks later she found out she was pregnant. She had been using her loyalty card to make purchases and had bought unscented hand cream and some other low perfume things that apparently are usually purchased by people who are expecting as their sense of smell becomes heightened and the sents become overwhelming.
Honestly I'd like to see a ban on targeted pharmaceutical advertisement. Prescription medication should be between you and your doctor.
And then what they found was that to be more effective was to mix up the suggestions for late term pregnancy / early childhood products with basically random nonsense...
... because if its too obvious that they are highly statistically confident that they know things about you that they shouldn't, people get weirded out and are less likely to buy something so specifically targeted at them.
They know an insane amount, and they do not want you to know that they know that much.
To play the devil's advocate, they could be putting that random junk there to see if they can find out other categories of things that you like.
¿Porque no los dos?
Why couldn't it be both?
Are we sure we can call that targeted pharmaceutical advertisement? It sounds like it could just be the algorithm accidentally discovering a correlation between expecting mothers and preference for unscented hand creams and such.
Unless Amazon did specifically program that in, I think these accidental correlation is not something you can control before it happens and trying to regulate them would be a waste of time and resources.
Of course, we could just ban ad tracking entirely and solve the problem in an instant.
Yes, that one I agree with.
The article I mentioned wasn't targeting her for prescription pharmaceuticals.
I specifically think that if there is a prescription pharmaceutical add it should not be algorithmically given to you.
IIRC, she miscarried and sued for the emotional distress of continued ads which followed the expected development of her (tragically lost) baby.
holy shit
But how do you know if a prescription is right for you if you can't ask your doctor today! /s
The other things were like a large purse/tote bag and a rug, so yeah it was kinda random (so it seems) but apparently the evidence is pretty solid in that case.
Doesn’t make it any less weird though.
The republicans would love this technology but they're to busy trying to figure out how to turn on their TV. What's the wire thing in the back of it supposed to do? What about the little black brick with letters on it? It doesn't even say anything useful like WTF is 123? 456? 789? I get it seven ate nine! It gets this one, its funny 🤣! Anyway it will take some time before the republicans could make use of tech like that.... unless evil people help them.
Ohh, there's plenty of IT people that are Republican. There are just less IT jobs in the rural areas.
Also most medium- plus sized businesses have conservative-minded owners and they all need IT staff either in-house or rental.