This is an example of Social Cooling: https://socialcooling.com
Personally, disposable virtual machines on Qubes OS for browsing make me less stressful about that.
Afraid to Google a thing because I don't want the algorithm to think I like it
181–190 of 215 posts
Re: Afraid to Google a thing because I don't want the algorithm to think I like it
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or your smart TV.
These comments made me wonder if any smart TVs have something like built-in content-id detection, which then somehow gets shared with the mother ship. One precedent is Nielsen Audio's Portable People Meter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Audio#Portable_People_... I assume that if surveillance can be done, someones are doing it.
yes of course. Roku tv does content recognition.
Re: Afraid to Google a thing because I don't want the algorithm to think I like it
#183Put in an old DVD of Dr. Strangelove:... recently in the XBox. It was just a random thought to pop it in and enjoy. (okay, was cleaning up shelf) I eventually realized I could skip around and enjoy the parts I liked. Freely. Without that feeling of being watched. Flashback.
This is the default experience of vlc, mpv, and kodi. You have to do the surveillance-navigating work when obtaining content, but then when you're relaxing you're free to relax.
Re: Afraid to Google a thing because I don't want the algorithm to think I like it
#184It must be miserable to use technology with such paranoia.
Re: Afraid to Google a thing because I don't want the algorithm to think I like it
#185I'm mildly curious about the whole Jordan Peterson anti-woke movement. Mildly, as in, I'm interested in the arguments but I often don't agree with them. I once made the mistake of clicking on a Peterson YouTube video and subsequently got only obscene alt-right "Peterson KILLS stupid feminist reporter!!" type of edited content. Like at some point 80% of my suggestions was crap like that, drowning out all the lovely ne…
Im the opposite. I very ocassionally watch a JP video which I find interesting and it means Google no longer fills my feed with woke stuff which is nice.
Re: Afraid to Google a thing because I don't want the algorithm to think I like it
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can turn off auto play FYI.
You can disable autoplaying of next episodes in a series that you're watching, and you can disable autoplaying of previews, but I don't see any way to disable autoplaying of movies and shows in general when you're looking at their info pages.
Those are previews as far as I know.
Re: Afraid to Google a thing because I don't want the algorithm to think I like it
#187I don't know how common this is, but I've gotten into the habit of creating "personas"-- different users that have different habits and are interested in different things, yet all me. It's insane that I feel it helpful to take on "multiple personalities", but there it is. Part of it is that these algorithms are fairly one-track. They can mix it up a bit, but it's always too much of one thing and too little of another…
It infuriates me that we basically had this as a feature, lost it, and have to sort of reimplement it with an almost illicit feel.
I can recall in the mod-late 1990s when Mainstream America was starting to go online for the first time, everyone was training their kids "never give out your real name." From that simple bit of stranger-danger paranoia, we built a lot of communities as psuedonymous by default-- your AIM "screen mame" was rarely your given name, you could have different usernames on each forum, your email address probably referenced your favourite sports team or anime character.
This inherently constrains aggressive "passive" personalization. Without an obvious canonical identity, you don't want to try to cross-profile too aggressively, because user "hakfoo" on site A may well be different from user "hakfoo" at site B, and you had to assume that any ID you tracked was limited or transient: when you go off to college or apply for a job, you're probably not going to want to be slapping "PonyGirl1987" on your resume.
I wonder if it's that the algorithms are limited to being one-track or if they're overoptimized to being one-track though. I assume they have a profile somewhere that looks like "12% coin collecting, 31% travel to Paraguay, 9% 2004 Ford Focus Repair, ..." and then they offset that data with what content produces the best revenue/engagement/metric of the week. In the process, many secondary interests simply get demoted to the pont you see nothing but tire change tutorials.
Re: Afraid to Google a thing because I don't want the algorithm to think I like it
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so easy. It seems that major companies are on the offensive against privacy. Google search, map and translate display a pop up. Youtube search displays two (!). Bing translator is the most dishonest - for anything else than a trivial sentence, it requires a captcha to be completed, pretending that it detected abnormal traffic (I know it's a lie, because if I don't use private mode, it doesn't do this). The servic…
I imagine the captcha is to combat bots abusing the service. > I know it's a lie, because if I don't use private mode, it doesn't do this If you don't use incognito/private browsing then you have an ordinary-looking set of cookies, so it makes sense you wouldn't be challanged with a captcha.
The irony is that incongito looks the most distinct of anything because of that.
You'd think there'd be a plugin that gathers some common tracking cookies, and swaps them around with other users. So the adtech firms see a tangled mess of location/IP/interest data.
If the randomization is log enough, the cookies pollute the data while hopefully remaining "conventionally looking" enough that they won't be discarded outright.
Re: Afraid to Google a thing because I don't want the algorithm to think I like it
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can disable autoplaying of next episodes in a series that you're watching, and you can disable autoplaying of previews, but I don't see any way to disable autoplaying of movies and shows in general when you're looking at their info pages.
Those are previews as far as I know.
Previews show on the main screen when you hover. But clicking in to get more info auto-starts the show, not just a preview.