I want to rant about FaceBook ads. If you go through my likes and pages I follow you'd be certain I'm a teenage boy - anime, robotics/CV labs, motocross clubs, sport car brands, skateparks, punk bands....
What ads do I get? Underwear that absorbs your period, cosmetics and wedding dresses. It's like they totally discard my personal preferences and show me ads that would appeal to the generic 30 year old female.
That's lame.
Fuck, I get ads for "all body type" clothes with plus size models. All that deep learning shit, and you can't see from my images I have a 60cm waist? At least show me the skinny girls brands....

I'm wondering if opting out of targeted ads could be the reason

@chilledfrogs Is that something I need to do actively? I never recall doing that...

@NickyBones Probably, no clue then if you didn't opt out 😅

@chilledfrogs Probably is. No doubt they still steal and abuse your data, but with targeted ads off they are only allowed to show ads based on a few public profile fields and the currently visited page.

Facebook is present on a few GDPR choice aggregators, so opting out of such lists might opt you out on Facebook as well.

@chilledfrogs I've been looking for it for a few minutes still can't find where to check for this option 🤣

So I found this - but I don't even know what are the bottom 3 brands....
Also Versace and Wish is kind of contradictory - 10,000$ and 10$ clothes. Right.

Even better - I don't drink, not interested in kids, don't have pets and couldn't care less about other people's issues. Bingo.

obligatory did you opt out of personalized ads?

I'm guessing you didn't?

Which makes me kind of laugh at all the money spent on training these AIs

edit: nevermind their system just seems to be broken lmao

@NickyBones I remember once checking these topic lists on twitter

and I was astounded how Twitter assigned political stances to me, which not only I absolutely have nothing to do with, but also tended to contradict themselves.

All in all I think we're still far away from Skynet.

Don't forget that these are topics you seem to engage with, not necessarily things you like, @LotsOfCaffeine

If you spend sad sleepless nights arguing with idiots you'll get put in the same groups as them

@LotsOfCaffeine I don't think I opt out of something I didn't even know where to find :)
I also think something is very wrong with their algorithms.

@homo-lorens Yeah, but with all the hype around Transformers I would expect them to do better than cluster @LotsOfCaffeine with idiots.

User-profiling-based targeted advertising in general is just a smidge away from being straight scam.
They tell the marketing people that they use millions of paramters to target the best matching audience in realtime. And they actually do that.

But predicting purchase decisions by the previous experience of a person is pretty darn hard even if you know all the data.
And they really still don't have all the data.

Also, that is a task that depends heavily on massive amounts of context, emotions and taken conclusions. Humans are orders of magnitude better at deriving and processing all that shit than the best AI.
Yet that task is still extremely hard for humans too.

Regardless your age, i doubt, that you will ever think to yourself "wow, that is good targetting - they totally nailed the last ten ads!"
It just won't happen. You can even give them your diary (and chances are, you actually already did). They just can't do any better (and they are really trying hard).

I try to turn off targeted advertising wherever I can. In many cases, untargeted ads end up being more accurate overall just because they're random and cover a wide range of products, as opposed to focusing on one particular thing that I really don't need to buy right now.

Even Amazon, which you'd expect to be somewhat accurate since they can advertise products based on past purchases, really need to tune their algorithm a bit. I ordered a very expensive new laptop and all of the targeted ads and "recommendations" were for laptops for the next several months.

They don't seem to differentiate between cheap products that need to be replaced often and expensive products that are intended to last several years, so now they think I'm a laptop connoisseur because I bought one a year ago.

Same here... Fuckbook showing me ads for plus-size women clothes...

I'm not that fat and I'm not into crossdressing either D:

@FinlayDaG33k what if you actually are? 🤔

uBlock Origin exists. It also blocks Ads.

Just want to make sure that no IT worker is left behind...

@iiii Might want to start doubting my entire existence at that point :|

Google's demographic stuff is also terrible.
Why would a thirty-six-year-old celibate and misanthropist be "interested" in parenting?
Similarly, why would a man who fairly strongly dislikes Android be "interested" in Android?