"Now, the thing is, legitimate-seeming businesses can't just give you porn links all the time, because that's Not Safe For Work, so the job of most modern recommendation algorithms is to return the closest thing to porn that is still Safe For Work": Apenwarr: Forget Privacy: You're Terrible at Targeting Anyway: "Let's get rich on targeted ads and personalized recommendation algorithms. It's what everyone else does! Or do they? The state of personalized recommendations is surprisingly terrible. At this point, the top recommendation is always a clickbait rage-creating article about movie stars or whatever Trump did or didn't do in the last 6 hours. Or if not an article, then a video or documentary. That's not what I want to read or to watch, but I sometimes get sucked in anyway, and then it's recommendation apocalypse time, because the algorithm now thinks I like reading about Trump, and now everything is Trump. Never give positive feedback to an AI...
...This is, by the way, the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There's no magic here. If you use ML to teach a computer how to sort through resumes, it will recommend you interview people with male, white-sounding names, because it turns out that's what your HR department already does. If you ask it what video a person like you wants to see next, it will recommend some political propaganda crap, because 50% of the time 90% of the people do watch that next, because they can't help themselves, and that's a pretty good success rate.... Someone who works on web search once told me that they already have an algorithm that guarantees the maximum click-through rate for any web search: just return a page full of porn links. (Someone else said you can reverse this to make a porn detector: any link which has a high click-through rate, regardless of which query it's answering, is probably porn.)
Now, the thing is, legitimate-seeming businesses can't just give you porn links all the time, because that's Not Safe For Work, so the job of most modern recommendation algorithms is to return the closest thing to porn that is still Safe For Work. In other words, celebrities (ideally attractive ones, or at least controversial ones), or politics, or both. They walk that line as closely as they can, because that's the local maximum for their profitability. Sometimes they accidentally cross that line, and then have to apologize or pay a token fine, and then go back to what they were doing....
When (non-Amazon) vendors get the idea that I might want something... because I visited their web site and looked at it... their advertising partner chases me around the web trying to sell me the same thing... even if I already bought it.... The advertiser has a tracker that it places on multiple sites and tracks me around. So it doesn't know what I bought, but it does know what I looked at, probably over a long period of time, across many sites. Using this information, its painstakingly trained AI makes conclusions about which other things I might want to look at, based on... well, based on what?... Some complicated matrix-driven formula humans can't possibly comprehend, but which is 10% better? Probably not. Probably what it does is infer my gender, age, income level, and marital status. After that, it sells me cars and gadgets if I'm a guy, and fashion if I'm a woman. Not because all guys like cars and gadgets, but because some very uncreative human got into the loop.... You know this is how it works, right? It has to be. You can infer it from how bad the ads are....
This whole ecosystem is amazing. Let's look at online news web sites. Why do they load so slowly nowadays? Trackers. No, not ads-trackers. They only have a few ads, which mostly don't take that long to load. But they have a lot of trackers, because each tracker will pay them a tiny bit of money to be allowed to track each page view. If you're a giant publisher teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and you have 25 trackers on your web site already, but tracker company #26 calls you and says they'll pay you $50k a year if you add their tracker too, are you going to say no? Your page runs like sludge already, so making it 1/25th more sludgy won't change anything, but that $50k might....
It's not just ads... What about content recommendation algorithms though? Do those work? Obviously not. I mean, have you tried them. Seriously. That's not quite fair.... Pandora's music recommendations are surprisingly good, but they are doing it in a very non-obvious way.... Apparently... Pandora spent a lot of time hand-coding a bunch of music characteristics and writing a "real algorithm" (as opposed to ML) that tries to generate playlists based on the right combinations of those characteristics.... If Pandora can figure out a good playlist based on a starter song and one or two thumbs up/down clicks, then... I guess it's not profiling you. They didn't need your personal information either.
Netflix: While we're here, I just want to rant about Netflix, which is an odd case of starting off with a really good recommendation algorithm and then making it worse on purpose.... Once upon a time Netflix was a DVD-by-mail service.... It was absolutely essential that at least one of this week's DVDs was good enough to entertain you for your Friday night movie.... Eventually though, Netflix moved online, and the cost of a bad recommendation was much less.... Nowadays Netflix isn't about finding the best movie, it's about satisficing. If it has the choice between an award-winning movie that you 80% might like or 20% might hate, and a mainstream movie that's 0% special but you 99% won't hate, it will recommend the second one every time. Outliers are bad for business. The thing is, you don't need a risky, privacy-invading profile to recommend a mainstream movie.... As promised, Netflix paid out their $1 million prize to buy the winning recommendation algorithm, which was even better than their old one. But they didn't use it, they threw it away.
Some very expensive A/B testers determined that this is what makes me watch the most hours of mindless TV. Their revenues keep going up. And they don't even need to invade my privacy to do it. Who am I to say they're wrong?...
#noted
