Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Free Mac Mini
a pregnant gay Korean man? Kimchee with added folic acid? A KIA with the LATCH system?
To read the story without having to register for the (pay) site, use this link:
3 6872356908,00.html
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB10382619
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."
That's not the article! Here's the real text from wsj.com:
If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here's How to Set It Straight
What You Buy Affects Recommendations
On Amazon.com, Too; Why the Cartoons?
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
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."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man."
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
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."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
It looks to me as if they simply look at the genre of the program you rate high and then take that to be your preference.
I found out that the hard way, one day I went home and I found the tivo filled with idiotic shows like: "Price is right" and "Spend $1000 in 1 minute", "Blind date" etc... upon investigating I realized that I've have rated "Junkyard Wars" (a competition of building things from junk) and "BattleBots" (remote controlled robot fight show) high the previous day, this triggered the game-show category to be recorded.
As Larry David would say: pretty-pretty-pretty dumb.
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
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."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man." [TiVo Remote] Remote Control: Viewers help TiVo understand their tastes by giving TV shows thumbs up or down.
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
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."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at
jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com
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
$3.75 (Save $19.20)
At Home in Mitford
Paperback, 1996
Jan Karon
$1.00 (Save $11.95)
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
Hardcover Textbook, 1999
Melissa Bank, Melissa Banks
$2.25 (Save $21.70)"
--
People who bought this book also bought clean underwear, ladybug rainboots and cheetah print slippers
...give a checkbox in the user preferences, "I {do,do not} have an interest in stories from subscription-only sites."
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
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 subscribe to WSJ, and every day middle-low on the front page, they have a "humor" story, I suppose for really uptight type-A people. That was today's, so I assume no anti-TiVo subtext.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The key thing is not to profile for things that will offend people unless there's an opt-in somewhere: sexuality, religious beliefs, etc. And the filters for language are obviously way off: it shouldn't start recording stuff in Korean unless you've watched at least two or three shows in Korean.
For non-programmers:
A bitmap is a data structure where a collection of bits is stored. This allows for more compact storing of information. For example a 32 bit word can be used to store 32 true-false values. This is more efficient than storing an array of 32 bytes with TRUE or FALSE in them. Bitmaps are not limited to storing true-false data. A 32 bit word can store 8 four bit values as well.
In the pregnant gay man example, the bitmap likley had bits for male/female, gay/straight and pregnant. Set them all to 1's and you get a pregnant homosexual male.
Uninitialized variables are caused when a function accesses a variable before explicitly setting it. This is a common problem in C/C++ and can result in some odd behavior. An uninitialized variable could result in the bits being set even though the program never explicitly set them.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
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,
It is most certainly a copyright violation, and not covered by fair use, since it is the entire article, with no commentary.
:)
That being said, thanks for posting it
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.
To my tivo, I'm a 5 year old with a $600 a week crack habit.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
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.
I find it interesting that people are talking about their Tivo's like they're sentient beings crouched on top of the TV, casting judgement on the crap you watch and recommending new crap to watch. It's just a computer program, people, and likely a fairly simple one at that.
I don't have a Tivo (or a TV, for that matter), but my Amazon profile still hasn't recovered from when my wife was in graduate school studying developmental psychology, specializing in childhood trauma. More books about child sexual abuse, just what I wanted. =:-O The programming books are staging a comeback, though.
What I find particularly interesting are the "people who ordered this also ordered these" selections. On infrequently-ordered titles, it only takes one or two wackos with bizarre profiles to generate some really peculiar results.
As the article points out, the suggestion algoritm isn't perfect, but if it gets off target, it's fairly easy to correct... even though the users in the article obviously hadn't figured out the most efficient way to do so. The suggestion system works by allowing the viewer to press the "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" button. Strangely enough you can give a show up to three thumbs up or down (most people I know only have two thumbs;). The algorithm uses these ratings to find shows that have been catagorized the same way as shows that the user has rated highly. One thing that most people don't realize is that any show selected for recording automatically gets one thumb up. Naturally, for this system to work, show catagorizations have to be accurate, which isn't always the case.
The users in the article who recorded lots of shows to counter the ratings were doing things the hard way. A much easier way is simply to go to the suggestions screen where TiVo supplies a list of recommended shows that it thinks the viewer might want to see. From there, it's easy to just give three thumbs down to each of the shows that the viewer doesn't like. On a lucky day the show that caused the problem in the first place will appear as a re-run, so the problem can be fixed quickly. This can be repeated until the suggestions screen only shows stuff that the viewer likes.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Who gave this a score +5 Interesting? If you clicked on the link and actually read the story, you would know that www.wsj.com is not free, but online.wsj.com is free (atleast for this story).
This isn't all that funny. I'd even say it's serious. While the consequences in this case are little more than a strange and perhaps unexpected selection of programming, consider the consequences if say, lyin' Johnny (Poindexter) and a huge government bureaucracy drew some equally bizarre conclusions based on what you've bought, what you've watched on TV, or how frequently you've visited a certain establishment, or where you've traveled. I hope the 'suspicious' person is still laughing as they're being carted off to a Q&A session with a couple of HomeSec droids. While coercing Tivo to modify it's behavior is but a minor annoyance, I can't help but think that we're about the see the very real danger in allowing others to acquire the means to draw completely inaccurate conclusions about who we are and what we're doing.
I'd also bet that Tivo doesn't have a "Terrorist" tag...
True, and I don't think the profiling data is centrally stored either. (But I don't have a Tivo, so I wouldn't know.)
However, can you imagine the kind of bad assumptions some people might make if they knew someone regularly watched "The Quaran Today" and other Muslim religious programming?
I can spell. I just can't type.
While I can't really know what kind of effort was put into these systems, it seems unlikely that Amazon or TiVo hired a team of veteran AI developpers to build these features. That being said, this problem still underlies a trend in all AI systems, no matter how good. That is that they are all really quite dumb when you compare them to anything we would call "reasonable" intelligence. They are incredibly fallible, incredibly silly machines in terms of their output to a large extent. Sure they can be made to do wonderful things, but it always has to be done with a group of human "moderators" to judge and assess the machine's performance and output, and that with a large grain of salt.
The idea that a machine is objective and not biased like people is absurd. They are more biased. They can only follow mindlessly the rules set down for them by their designers, and do not have the breadth or depth of experience that people have to know when the rules don't apply. Even the best dynamic systems and neural nets have these flaws somewhere or other. While it is funny to see them goof like this, it is scary to think that Governments are going to use similar techniques for vital things like law enforcement. This is a serious concern to all of our civil rights.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
You missed a critical phrase: Since it is the entire article.
Fair use considers how much of the text is used, and using the whole thing all at once is almost certainly to be found a violation by the judge.
Additionally, fair use considers "monetary damages" caused by the use. Since the Post has a subscription system and not just the standard advertisements, "monetary damages" could be very significant; people who might have subscribed instead just read it here.
IANAL either but most people extremely seriously overestimate the power of fair use. Posting the article was a copyright violation, to a high enough degree of certainty I don't feel the need to qualify that with any variation of "probably".
Remember... the law is not what you think it is, it is what the the law says and how a judge interprets it. The Slashdot community as a whole is very incorrect in its interpretation of "fair use".
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.
When you first get a TiVo, it doesn't have a lot to go on, so it seems to use some generic suggestions to see what you think of them. After a few weeks of regular use, especially if you have set up multiple Season Passes and/or asked to record shows, it will fine-tune the suggestions. Also, if you delete a recorded suggestion without watching it (or more than 5 minutes), the TiVo notes that and adjusts future suggestions (though not as much as a ThumbsDown).
It is not a good idea to give three thumbs-down on a lot of shows, this will tend to deterioriate the suggestions algorithm. One thumb is usually sufficient, but keep in mind that TiVo doesn't know, for an individual show rating, WHY you thumbed it, so it adds or subtracts weighting from entries for genre, actors, directors, etc.
As an example - my wife has season passes for various home improvement shows, such as Changing Rooms. So we get lots of suggestions for other home and garden shows, including various Martha Stewart shows. My wife hates Martha, so we give her shows one thumb down, but the TiVo doesn't know it's because of Martha. It's the collective weight of other ratings that tune the suggestions.
For a while, there was a hidden feature called TeachTiVo, that allowed you to rate individual actors, directors, titles and genres. The UI wasn't complete (and was buggy), and you had to "enable backdoors" to get at it at all. The whole feature was removed in recent versions, unfortunately. I'd like to see something like it return in the future.