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When Profiling Goes Wrong
huskymo writes "This morning's Wall Street Journal is carrying a funny story on TiVo and Amazon's automatic customer profiling. As most Slashdot readers probably know, TiVo keeps track of which programs you record and--if you haven't told it not to--records other programs it thinks you'd like. The article describes users that TiVo's mistaken for Korean, for gay, even for "a pregnant gay man.""
Funny as hell.
Too bad we can't read it.
Well, most folks post without RTFA anyway, so why have the links?
Jeez, what kind of system would even allow "pregnant gay man" to be an available category?
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
I would be greatly insulted to be called korean.
To be fair, I think the government will actually get these statistics from elsewhere. Would you rather trust medical records and doctors or Amazon to tell you if someone is pregnant?
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
so the question is:
what does "a pregnant gay man" like to watch?
Mind of the married man on HBO...
Tivo thought he was gay. so he tried to changes its mind by taping shows with sexy girls and his wife got pissed...
How many of you think that CmdrTaco has a WSJ subscription? Anybody?
J.
a pregnant gay Korean man? Kimchee with added folic acid? A KIA with the LATCH system?
I wish I could convince my Tivo that I don't speak Spanish! About 1/3 of its "automatic" recordings are in Spanish. I have even tried taking the Spanish channels off of the 'Channels You Receive' list and it still seems to record from them.
I don't know -- if you started watching the right movies. For instance, let's say one day you sat down for a nice marathon of movies. You start out with the Seige, then Collateral Damage, Air Force One, Executive Decision, True Lies, In the Line of Fire, and the The Peacemaker. Next day, the cops show up at your door and arrest you as a one-man "sleeper cell." Coincidence, anyone?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I am constantly getting mail to increase my penis size and grow hair. They should know better! I have long hair and a big, well, uh, you know...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
As direct marketing has become more intrusive into my life, I've taken to using my dog's name in various business dealings. She has name which was a popular name for girls about, oh, 80 years ago. (Like Brittany, Ashley and Nicole will be about 70 years from now.)
At any rate, I get this phone message for Violet from a retirement home in Phoenix.
They were "updating their records" and they "haven't heard from you in a while" and wanted to make sure she know about all the "wonderful plans they had" for their retirement community.
It reminded me of college days when the dorm would subscribe to publications under the moniker of Omar The Goat.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
TiVo is my favorite household pet of all time. I love the suggestions feature!! Then one day I had a houseguest show up for a few days and TiVo suddenly started thinking I liked gay porn. :(
:(
I was secretly hoping TiVo would turn me gay as a result (Hello lawsuit!) Naturally, you can understand why I was disapointed when a few days later I realized that I was still attracted to women.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
Cut and pasted from half.com:
"If you like MAC OS X Developer's Guide you may also enjoy:
Bridget Jones's Diary
Hardcover, 1998
Helen Fielding
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At Home in Mitford
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The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
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--
What? Then the websites could not 'anonymously' track the habits of Korean gay pregnant men!
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
People who bought this book also bought clean underwear, ladybug rainboots and cheetah print slippers
I'd probably be sent to tacobell.com and cowboys.com, but I think 'Hemos' would fool them.
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Wow, if this woman isn't a complete example of "stupid whore," I don't know what is. She's fine watching someone f*ck an apple pie, but Tom Green licking a mouse -- now THAT shit has got to stop!
Anyone else think it's kind of odd where she draws the line?
Motorist: Umm, no
Trooper: I got an email alert from TiVo alerting me that you've been taping the Fast & the Furious, Fast Lane, Gone in 60 seconds, and other shows that match a repeat speeders profile.
Motorist: ummm. I think that was my son...
Trooper: No, sir it correlates with your EzPass acitivity as well. Please step out of the car...
I looked at some dirty emails once and now I get messages all day asking if I want a larger penis, hot slutty teens. Sometimes it even bugs me to lower my mortgage payments or get deals on toner! Help! The Internet thinks I'm some kind of impoverished sex maniac!
Have remarks like yours and mine some usefullness?
My wife watched TLC's A Wedding Story twice a day for several months until Tivo started recording Divorce Court. After giving Divore Court the thumbs down, A Wedding Story returned. Is it just a coincidence?
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. [...] "I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
Want to bet about what she has in her nighttable?
Trolling is a art,
I was like, watching TV...and all of a sudden it was like...bleep bleep bloop bleep...and it start showing me gay porn.
Tivo devoured my tv show...
And it was a very good TV show too. And, now because of it...I'm like, watching gay porn 24/7...
Candy-Coated Knowledge
This article reminded me of my early Tivo days (before I turned the suggestions off).. One time I had some friends over and I wanted to show them my Tivo.. when I turned it on and headed to the menu, what did I find? An episode of 'The Golden Girls', 'ALF', and 'Dukes of Hazzard'! It wasn't until my friends got up off the floor from laughing and making fun of my television tastes that I could explain to them that the Tivo tries to record things based on my tastes.
More amazingly I gave each of these shows 3 thumbs down.. but every once in a while, Tivo would still record 'Golden Girls' for me.. as if it was trying to say, "Nonono, seriously, this is a good show! You must have just seen one bad episode, give it another try!"
-gerbik
I can see it now, /. starts automagically filtering comments based on those comments you've clicked on. Now all I can see is :
....
/. seems to have already implemented this ...
First Post!
Imagine a beowulf
Sony/M$ sux, OS rules
CmdrTaco can't spell
This is old news
Oh wait,
I struggled a bit with this during the first few months that I had a TiVo. "Oh! You like the news!" "Oh! You like old sitcoms!" "Oh! You like children's cartoons!"
How I responded was to thumbs-down any recorded suggestion that I didn't like. And after a while, TiVo learned. A little too well.
In fact, now, it hardly records any recommendations at all. And they are usually some bland program that is completely unnoteworthy. Frankly, I wish my TiVo had some balls.
I'd like for it to try suggestion some new programs that hit the air each season. Or something a little daring. But it is too timid and weak to come close. I'm afraid that I've broken its spirit.
Excellent. I will now always register for sites, magazine subscriptions with this Omar The Goat moniker and I encourage everyone to do the same. Thanks for the idea 4of12.
----
Spam subject of the moment: Offshore account secrets -nashville disrupt
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi.
;) Oh, if only that "y" would disappear... :)
No, but he does have a very funny surname
Get your own free personal location tracker
To my tivo, I'm a 5 year old with a $600 a week crack habit.
Whatever you do, don't look behind you.
Dude, you should make a note of your own sig when posting something like this!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
She should order The Demon Seed (the older, non 1997 version) as her next book if she really thinks that way.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
I must say, I almost never actually like anything it records for me as a suggestion. I hardly every bother to do the thumbs up/down, so the TiVo just goes based on what I explicitly record. I have only one season pass, for the simpsons, and then usually record shows one off here and there. This gives some eclectic suggestions.
Basically my TiVo seems to think I'm a violent (sopranos) child (simpsons) chef (iron chef). This means I get mostly random cooking shows and cartoons that I have no interest in whatsoever. Lately its obsessed with trying to get me to watch dexter's laboratory.
If I replace just one word and remove just two others, we have the definition of politics:
counterprogramming - noun - to use the front-end of a software program to perform operations with which the backend program should have been able to do in the first place.
...becomes...
politics - noun - to use the front-end of a person to perform operations with which the backend should have been able to do in the first place.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
I'd settle for some way to get the car from Spy Hunter and the Tesla Claw weapon from Ratchet & Clank into Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
--- Ban humanity.
Get the car from Spy Hunter into Frogger. Now's there roadkill waiting to happen!
-kgj
I love my TiVo, but I lost faith in its content recommender when it started recording "To Be Announced." (true story)
It also decided for a while that I really wanted to watch Korean love stories and Latino dance parties, but it got over that eventually.
Nowadays I keep my TiVo full enough that it never has room for suggested recordings, except the occasional SCTV or South Park, which is as it should be.
Kevin Fox
Or more likely even would be that the police would show up with some estrogen injections for you.
-You- "Who is it?"
-Police- "It's the police sir"
-You- "Ummm.. can I help you?"
-Police- "We're here with some estrogen sir."
-You- "Why?"
-Police- "Well, we received a disturbing 911 from your Tivo, it said your testicles needed to be taken back a notch."
...and I've been waiting for the right place to post this. I doubt I'll ever see a place where it will be more on-topic.
I use TiVo at work and have very specific reasons to turn off profiling: I never want it to record something I didn't tell it to record. It's not that I don't think it's a perfectly good feature. I just don't ever need it.
A couple of weeks of thumbing TiVo's suggestions up and down and profiling gets pretty good. Other than that, just remember it's not really profiling you. It's just filling the empty space on your hard drive with stuff that's somehow like stuff you've said you like (or stuff you've watched, if you haven't told it anything).
But I've got a different problem. My TiVo doesn't think I'm gay. I think it's gay. I leave it on CSPAN every night because I like to watch "Washington Journal" in the morning when I come in early to work. I don't want CSPAN cluttering up my hard disk, but (since TiVo auto-records the last 30 minutes of whatever the channel is set to) I'd prefer to have it record something interesting.
Recently, though, it's been watching The Discovery Channel when I get in to work. It hasn't recorded anything on Discovery; I don't have anything programmed to be recorded on Discovery; I don't even think I've ever watched a Discovery Channel show on it. But there it is: happily watching "Interior Motives" on The Discovery Channel. The only explanation I can come up with: It's got a crush on the host.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
You know that I cannot record it Dave ....
The other day I was looking at the listing for the Tron 20th anniversary DVD, and Amazon had this gem of a suggestion at the bottom:
Customers who wear clothes also shop for:
* Clean Underwear from Amazon's Gap Store
Vote Technocratic! Government by killer robots!
When I first got my TiVo, my roomate and I spent a couple hours adding programs to it. BattleBots, SeqQuest: DSV, lots of other Sci-Fi stuff, and a few selections from the Cartoon Network.
:)
Job well done...and the next evening we discovered that our TiVo installation coencided with a Care Bars marathon on Toon Disney. TiVo must have really thought we'd like Care Bares, because it filled itself with every episode of this Care Bare marathon.
This was before they clear to skip to the delete screen patch, so there were alot of menus involved in deleting every episode of Care Bares.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Yeah, but you post on /. so you must be a liberal tech hippy. I'll bet you like Star Wars, gadgets, and computers! Oh, and dressing up in women's lingerie.
You free thinkers are all alike.
"Programmers don't have a sense of humor."
"Yes they do! Witness the popularity of Monty Python among that set!"
"Exactly!"
"What, you're saying Monty Python isn't funny?"
"No, I'm just saying that programmers are so humor-deficient that they need to be (almost literally!) beaten about the head with extreme amounts of funny--and a laugh track to clue them in to the true significance of the sensation they're experiencing."
". . . "
"Shut up, you off-topic wankers!"
"Done and done!"
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
_______
What, doesn't he know anything about the Nazis? A whole bunch of them loved to dress up in women's clothes. That TIVO is brilliant.
Your TiVo doesn't record any comedy shows, does it..