Technology1 min read

I wish tech companies knew more about me

By · Published by Everything Blog

In short

Advanced tracking systems routinely push useless advertisements, such as pitching car insurance to existing policyholders, promoting children's discounts to people without kids, or suggesting niche machinery like asphalt cleaning tractors. Furthermore, services struggle to retain basic profile and language settings, often overriding English preferences with local storefronts in German or Finnish. Entertainment giants also fail to adapt, as Netflix still forces long-time solo users to select a profile while video platforms skew recommendations based on a single search.

Key points

  • Extensive consumer tracking often produces irrelevant commercial recommendations instead…: Extensive consumer tracking often produces irrelevant commercial recommendations instead of accurate, useful targeting.
  • Major digital platforms repeatedly ignore explicit behavioral habits and configured user…: Major digital platforms repeatedly ignore explicit behavioral habits and configured user language preferences.
  • Basic user interface inconveniences persist on platforms like Netflix despite decades of…: Basic user interface inconveniences persist on platforms like Netflix despite decades of available account history.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

"Tech companies are spying on us" is a truism at this point. Endless articles and investigations have ensured that everybody is aware: they are spying on us, they listen to our conversations, they know more about us than we know ourselves, they know you're going to be fired or become pregnant or become depressed before it happens...

I have never felt anything close to that.

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". Here, I literally just opened a random website with no adblocker, and I see a purple gamepad I recently purchased, with two other gamepads:

When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.

Using Google Chrome, logged into my Google account, I searched…

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