I wish tech companies knew more about me

BigTTYGothGF

A very odd stance. Personally if I'm going to be tracked and advertised to I want it to be things I have absolutely no interest in, even better if it's in a language I don't speak.

everdrive

Targeted advertising will never feel good, and it's not due to lack of information. Consider the following: - 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.

watwut

> My user account, system locale, browser locale, and keyboard settings are all set to English. I am logged into Chrome and all Google services. I travel to Germany every few months, and lots of services that I've been using for years suddenly decide I speak German. 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.

ano-ther

Not even tracking, but when I land on a page from a Google search, some sites try to be helpful by steering me to a local site, but the local link does not exist so I end up on the homepage, not the specific help I was looking for. Adobe and Lenovo are really good at this.

williamdclt

I've been making this point for at least 10y, and I think it's gotten 0% better. It's already infuriating how much data is collected about me against my will and any sense of ethics, but it makes me LIVID that all this invasion of privacy has completely shit results. Pretty sure I'd be more sensitive to advertising if it was fully random, at least I'd see stuff I was curious about or didn't expect I'd be interested in, instead of myriads of variations of things I already bought or that are adjacent to something I bought (and therefore I already have too).

dongecko

Loved that little rant. You had me at "I skip every single electronic track with vocals".

gedy

Targeted advertising just has not worked on me or many people - If I'm interested enough to buy something, my digital trail is of that moment and in the process of buying and already sifted through the noise. Ads a week later for some random thing are pointless. 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?

Frieren

> I live in Helsinki 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.

titzer

I worked for Google for 10 years. All of my personal email and all of my work email (back then, Google, now CMU) goes through Gmail. They know basically everything that's ever been sent as a receipt in an email. They know what I watch on YouTube, what I search for Google, and Android's little Google rootkit knows everywhere I go, and by extension, everyone I hang out with. They know I install an adblocker everywhere I can. I rail against advertising and tracking on the internet (this site) all the time. 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!

Kuyawa

"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." Programmers :-D

tjansen

This! I don't mind tech companies knowing things about me. If I don't want them to know, I browse in Safari's anonymous mode. 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.

mrkeen

On YouTube, I get the same rotation of 3 ads almost constantly. A shampoo that I have no interest in, a detergent that I used to have (but no longer, because I associate with spam), and a dusting brush (I had no idea these things still existed!) 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.

Dependance

Who is advertising for ? Maybe your mistake is supposing it is to benefit you in any way shape or form ? "I wish the farmer knew more about me, it gives me corn but what I want is sunlight !"

d-lowl

Yeah, the fact that too many websites just ignore language settings/preferences (both system, and browser it seems) is really annoying. Location-based language picking doesn't even make sense in some locations. Like ebay not even giving an option to switch from German to anything else, if you are in Switzerland. They seem to be unaware that Switzerland is a multilingual country?

MostlyStable

The answer to this is not better information for better ads. It's a Pi-hole or other DNS level ad blocking + uBlock origin. 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.

NoboruWataya

It is a hard truth to swallow for many on HN (myself included) but the reality is a lot of normies don't mind ads at all. I recently told my wife how to install an ad blocker and her response was "but sometimes I see cool stuff in ads". I'm sure the percentage of "cool stuff" she sees is higher because of what they know about her. 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).

BeetleB

Mildly related: I always felt this way with Youtube's recommendations. For me, they're the epitome of dysfunction. It's so rare it will recommend something I want to see.

erelong

> 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. 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)

swiftcoder

> I get shown ads for products I just purchased. All this spying, machine learning, big data result in "he bought a mattress, show him more mattresses". 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".

modeless

I don't understand the skepticism that people who bought something are more likely than a randomly selected person to buy another one of that kind of thing. Yes, even stuff like mattresses. If you think about it for more than ten seconds it should be obvious why this is true.