<story><title>Most Americans don’t realize what companies can predict from their data</title><url>https://theconversation.com/most-americans-dont-realize-what-companies-can-predict-from-their-data-110760</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mattkrause</author><text>I’m not thrilled about the amount of information being hoovered up, but....the predictions being made with it aren’t terribly impressive.&lt;p&gt;Facebook should know a great deal about me, but the advertising categories it puts me in are either completely obvious (based on locations and group memberships that I’ve explicitly told it), or bonkers. It currently thinks I’m part of multiple wildly incompatible religions and political groups and am interested in a weird collection of abstract concepts (“decay”?)&lt;p&gt;Amazon thinks that my interests are dominated by textbooks and vacuum cleaners (if only!)&lt;p&gt;Twitter has correctly sussed out that someone who mostly follows scientists might be interested in science....or dogs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pdkl95</author><text>&amp;gt; the predictions being made with it aren’t terribly impressive&lt;p&gt;So what? They still have the data and can refine their methods tomorrow. Today their predictions might be low quality, but they can retry as many times as they want. The problem is not the predictions they are making today; it&amp;#x27;s the many predictions (or inferences) are able to keep making in the future.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; political groups&lt;p&gt;Remember that some types of advertising is &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; targeted. Some political advertising or branding advertising is intended to reach &amp;quot;all voters&amp;quot;j or maybe a very broad category like &amp;quot;Everyone Californian of voting age&amp;quot;. Branding campaigns don&amp;#x27;t care if you&amp;#x27;re interested in e.g. vacuum cleaners. They just want you to think of their name first every time you happen to think of or hear about vacuum cleaners.&lt;p&gt;edit: (Multiple contradicting groups could be pushing ads at your (very general) demographic.)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; science....or dogs&lt;p&gt;Many scientists like dogs?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Amazon thinks that my interests&lt;p&gt;No, they think that showing you textbooks and vacuum cleaners has a greater chance of increasing their revenue, according to various statistical models. Targeted advertising isn&amp;#x27;t about targeting what &lt;i&gt;your&lt;/i&gt; are interested in. It&amp;#x27;s about letting other people target your with what they think they can sell you.&lt;p&gt;edit2: Of course, it could also be a terrible model trying to use data in stupid ways. I&amp;#x27;m just suggesting that there are many plausible explanations.</text></comment>
<story><title>Most Americans don’t realize what companies can predict from their data</title><url>https://theconversation.com/most-americans-dont-realize-what-companies-can-predict-from-their-data-110760</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mattkrause</author><text>I’m not thrilled about the amount of information being hoovered up, but....the predictions being made with it aren’t terribly impressive.&lt;p&gt;Facebook should know a great deal about me, but the advertising categories it puts me in are either completely obvious (based on locations and group memberships that I’ve explicitly told it), or bonkers. It currently thinks I’m part of multiple wildly incompatible religions and political groups and am interested in a weird collection of abstract concepts (“decay”?)&lt;p&gt;Amazon thinks that my interests are dominated by textbooks and vacuum cleaners (if only!)&lt;p&gt;Twitter has correctly sussed out that someone who mostly follows scientists might be interested in science....or dogs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cirgue</author><text>I do modeling for an advertising recommendation engine (not at Amazon). We do controls against both human-made rulesets and random, and we consistently outperform both by a big margin. However, click through rate is always really low, and a model that massively increases revenue still serves irrelevant content most of the time, and still seems random from the POV of the user. The point of ML in advertising recommendation is to guess better in aggregate, not get it right all the time.</text></comment>