Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 362 posts

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

#121

Post by woolvalley »

What she is asking will probably be even more creepy.

Currently these platforms are basically associating words to your user, which advertisers then select from a pull down.

Past some specialized categories created out of advertiser demand - such as political leaning, location, age and gender - there isn't much reasoning behind it.

First her user id got the pregnancy keywords associated, now she also has sad / still born words associated. The system isn't smart enough to reason that the two tags should be mutually exclusive in a culturally sensitive way, just like it doesn't with millions of other pairs around the world within 100s of other cultures & languages around the world.

But if it was, then how much worse could it get in other ways?

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

#122

Post by Spooky23 »

monksy wrote: post #111

While her situation is tragic, 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 a…

> She's demonstrating a huge amount of entitlement and technically illiteracy.

No, she's not.

I do have a problem with all of the various people that we interface with, including insurance organizations and pharmacies, abusing data sharing agreements intended for subrogation and similar procedures to manage pharmaceutical sales quotas and conduct outbound marketing.

My wife was admitted to the hospital due to complications that from what was an early miscarriage. The health insurer sells data that allows an advertiser to surmise that there was a hospital admission to the OB department. The PBM provides anyone paying with information regarding prescriptions before my insurer even gets the claim.

An advertiser (infant formula company) determines that my wife is likely pregnant and likely to deliver on Month/Day/Year. Guess what arrives on that day? A Fedex care package of formula.

That was a very hurtful event for us, and similar violations happen thousands of times every day. Both behind the scenes data brokers and front of house organizations like Facebook and Twitter are villains in this story.

It isn't entitlement or illiteracy to expect that ethically vacant entities don't abuse their positions to push products on you in hurtful ways. It's naive to assume that people give a shit, but that's not a demerit on her. I look forward to the day in the distant future when the government forces them to care.

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

#123

Post by whatshisface »

jbob2000 wrote: post #31
whatshisface wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people working around the clock to determine this information, and there's no indication that they couldn't just peg you as "open-minded" and start selling products associated with that.

Right! But I will not click on those ads because I am not part of that demographic. The whole point of doing this is to shift you to a demographic where the ads become irrelevant and you aren't tempted to click them.

The fact that you aren't clicking the ads is powerful evidence in itself, much stronger evidence than what you Google.

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

#124

Post by cat199 »

Klathmon wrote: post #40
skystrife wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it makes sense for ad platforms to enable a "clear history" option just like our browsers do? That way you can say very clearly "the current model is wrong, please restart and try building a new one for me". That might also help this particular case: rebuild the model from scratch including only content going forward rather than backward. Should eliminate the baby ads effectively, right?

Google at least let's you specifically go into ad settings and check/uncheck specific categories of things that you get ads about (that's an oversimplification of the process behind it). I'm not sure how but one time I started getting a few ads in Spanish about toothpaste. I had also just found out about the ad settings page, and after taking the minute to remove the handful of wrong interests, the incorrectly target…

> Google at least let's you specifically go into ad settings and ...

... improve the tracking accuracy of your data in exchange for reducing your annoyance with ads

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

#125

Post by stabbles »

NorthOf33rd wrote: post #100

Instagram is not a person. Don't ask it to be decent. Those ads are not your friends. Don't expect them to treat you like they care. You're not sharing your information with a human. You're sharing it with a business who is tuned to maximize profit. The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative. They don't care about you. You've made the decision to let a business deep into your personal l…

It's possible to interpret your comment as a direct response addressing the mother who put out the tweet, which seems very inappropriate. The point you're making might be true, but maybe it's better to rephrase it.

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

#126

Post by jeremy7600 »

nyxxie wrote: post #118

I felt immense pity for the mother in this scenario, and after reading the article I agreed that FB aught to have some sort of way to indicate that such advertisements are offensive and should not be shown to the user. Ideally, I'd like to see a paid tier that gets rid of advertising altogether. Then I read some of the comments here and on other sites. To put it bluntly, I don't understand the tone of entitlement peo…

No, I felt the same way. The platforms are just doing what they are programmed to do, its not meant to be offensive. The fact that it is offensive is not something a computer could detect, exactly, so in my mind the platforms have done nothing wrong.

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

#127

Post by save_ferris »

NorthOf33rd wrote: post #100

Instagram is not a person. Don't ask it to be decent. Those ads are not your friends. Don't expect them to treat you like they care. You're not sharing your information with a human. You're sharing it with a business who is tuned to maximize profit. The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative. They don't care about you. You've made the decision to let a business deep into your personal l…

I don't disagree with this, but this argument fails to acknowledge the responsibility of social media companies to communicate what information they gather about you and how they choose to use it. On both fronts, they're still entirely too opaque.

It might not be a fair comparison, but I feel like this argument is the equivalent to smoking for 40 years without realizing that it causes cancer because the hypothetical tobacco companies didn't have to disclose that information. When you go to the doctor and the doctor blames you for your failing health, is that fair for the doctor to do? You did something that was enjoyable and seemed novel without understanding the cost to your health.

Informed consent in social media is still laughable in 2018, and we don't really discuss that aspect of the issue enough IMO.

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

#128

Post by monksy »

aaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #103
jbob2000 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we could all just start googling and searching for things that are completely irrelevant to us. This would fuck up the advertising models and marketers would be forced to change their practices. So I say to you all: go and google some random shit and do some deep dives into it. Be predictably unpredictable.

https://adnauseam.io Here you go! Google actually banned this from the Chrome store so it must be hurting them.

For good reason: It's a fraudulent click.

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

#129

Post by gwbas1c »

I never shared anything about our pregnancies on Facebook until the babies came.

Anyway, it's stories like this that make me want to share even less personal information. It also shows that we've gotten far too carried away with marketing.

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

#130

Post by jlpicard »

NorthOf33rd wrote: post #109
cronix wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be a fun thing to do. Make google and the others pay out the nose by actually clicking as many ads as you can instead of avoiding them. Just have everybody be their own click farm. We could have an international "click to support business day" (hah) where for 24 hours everybody around the globe just clicks ads. That's what they want us to do, isn't it? Maybe we should give it to them.

This is fascinating. It seems like it would be pretty easy to write a chrome app that runs a window in the background that interacts with every. single. advertisement. Unfortunately the people to pay the toll would be the businesses running CPC campaigns, not google. You'd have to run it at such massive scale that google wouldn't be able to collect because advertisers could show that something was wrong with google's…

Maybe if they start seeing large number of clicks but far less conversions they might stop using big G and start looking at alternatives?
Post reply on HN