An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

She's demonstrating a huge amount of entitlement and technically illiteracy. She's making assumptions that all of these studies from data science and usage of recommendation/personalization systems are for her benefit. They're not, she's not paying the bills on that. That's for someone to sell her something. She's entitled because she believes that her unusual/rare situation should be accounted for and encoded in their global system.

Ok, I think I probably burned off a bit too much of the hn points there.. Now to get on my soapbox.

Reporters like this are exactly why no one understands or cares about privacy. If we're to have an honest disussion about this, the crux of the issue is: Should we have control over the data and interactions we perform. (the US doesn't have a GDPR)

The other thing that should be pointed out heavily: Most of the tech industry, in the last 10 years, has been solely focused on targeting the majority of people in profit grabs. This is an example of such of a focus.

It’s a suffering person, yes, but would I rather have Instagram that you can opt in to and receive targeted ads in exchange for its feature set than no Instagram? Yes. And I believe if we allowed people to make the free choice, they would too.

This is about the equivalent of going to a high school reunion and having people talk about their kids soon after you had a miscarriage. It’s horrible to have that happen but it’s an honest mistake.

Jumping on the “targeted advertising is evil” wagon just means we fail to solve it another more-likely way: like how you’d imply to your old classmates in that situation that you find it painful to hear about the topic right then.

Imagine your line of condescending argument being applied to someone complaining about being wrongly convicted and incarcerated, and who is calling for criminal justice reform. "You're entitled because you believe that your unusual/rare situation should be accounted for and encoded in the overall justice system"

edit: and the author even points out how she has done the manual work to give feedback to the algorithm:

> And when we millions of brokenhearted people helpfully click “I don’t want to see this ad,” and even answer your “Why?” with the cruel-but-true “It’s not relevant to me,” do you know what your algorithm decides, Tech Companies? It decides you’ve given birth, assumes a happy result, and deluges you with ads for the best nursing bras...

You read this, and yet still saw fit to berate the author for being "entitled". And then, one sentence later, go on to proclaim about how the "crux of the issue is: should we have control over the data and interactions we perform"? How does that work exactly?

2) >She's making assumptions that all of these studies from data science and usage of recommendation/personalization systems are for her benefit. They're not, she's not paying the bills on that. That's for someone to sell her something.

Advertising (at its best) is for the consumer's benefit. A consumer needs to make informed decisions about their purchases, and they need information disseminated to them to make those decisions. That information being released is advertising.

As a human being, she is entitled to make the case that those who create and control the information dissemination systems don't cause literal terror.