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.

Comments

Re:Article text, here ya go.

[tiwason]

Yet i see nothing about a pregant gay man ??

You sure this is the article ?

Methinks some moderators have been had...

[Proaxiom]

There is zippo pregnant gay man content in this article.

Is this a violation of the DMCA?

[Milkyman]

Is posting like this violating some laws?

Re:Article text, here ya go.

[Crimson Midget]

You need to be introduced to two important concepts on this site. One is that text written in italics was NOT written by Taco, Hemos, michael, or any of the other editors. The description you refer to was written by the submitter, huskymo. Second, is the concept behind the comma. You see, the commas in the description are marking divisions in the sentence. The man thought to be Korean is not the man thought to be pregnant and gay.

Re:Where to next?

[G00F]

What scary is this type of stuff already happens, and is being pushed more. It is not very far from what you joke about now. But that is exacly what they want.