No, she's not.
I do have a problem with all of the various people that we interface with, including insurance organizations and pharmacies, abusing data sharing agreements intended for subrogation and similar procedures to manage pharmaceutical sales quotas and conduct outbound marketing.
My wife was admitted to the hospital due to complications that from what was an early miscarriage. The health insurer sells data that allows an advertiser to surmise that there was a hospital admission to the OB department. The PBM provides anyone paying with information regarding prescriptions before my insurer even gets the claim.
An advertiser (infant formula company) determines that my wife is likely pregnant and likely to deliver on Month/Day/Year. Guess what arrives on that day? A Fedex care package of formula.
That was a very hurtful event for us, and similar violations happen thousands of times every day. Both behind the scenes data brokers and front of house organizations like Facebook and Twitter are villains in this story.
It isn't entitlement or illiteracy to expect that ethically vacant entities don't abuse their positions to push products on you in hurtful ways. It's naive to assume that people give a shit, but that's not a demerit on her. I look forward to the day in the distant future when the government forces them to care.
My cellular company shouldn’t be selling my location data, my pharmacy shouldn’t be selling my prescriptions to some aggregator. The people running the companies that aggregated my wife’s medical history should be in prison as far as I am concerned.
This forum was vociferous against the NSA when Snowden came out. Why is NSA a bad guy when a formula company has access to similar telemetry to peddle product?
Imagine your line of condescending argument being applied to someone complaining about being wrongly convicted and incarcerated, and who is calling for criminal justice reform. "You're entitled because you believe that your unusual/rare situation should be accounted for and encoded in the overall justice system"
edit: and the author even points out how she has done the manual work to give feedback to the algorithm:
> And when we millions of brokenhearted people helpfully click “I don’t want to see this ad,” and even answer your “Why?” with the cruel-but-true “It’s not relevant to me,” do you know what your algorithm decides, Tech Companies? It decides you’ve given birth, assumes a happy result, and deluges you with ads for the best nursing bras...
You read this, and yet still saw fit to berate the author for being "entitled". And then, one sentence later, go on to proclaim about how the "crux of the issue is: should we have control over the data and interactions we perform"? How does that work exactly?
1. You collect and annotate data (This is probably about 90% of the work here)
2. Someone has a goal of something to find or query
3. Develop models that can solve that goal, or redefine
4. Use the output
> Criminal justifce reform
The consequences from are a lot higher. We've seen this over 1000+ years about some of the conerning court cases. That's why we have ideas such as "spirit of the law," human judges, juries, and appeals. Additionally, this is why the law is so complicated and murky. Computers are very bad at this.
I'm especially hard on this individual because she's using her position with WaPO to try to publically "humiliate" those tech companies.
> Giving feedback
This is where some of the techincal literacy comes in a well, she doesn't seem to understand that the feedback requires human understanding is not something that is "intelligently" accounted for. Systems like that do not exist. The ad platform isn't something that is designed to accomidate her needs. (which is why I used the word entitled) It's a bit like being upset over those same ads being shown on TV. (media literacy covers, those are ads they may or may not be targeted towards you and those do not have to reflect your reality)
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As far as the data privacy bit goes: We should have control over the data that is collected about us and have the ability to remove it later. At the moment the strongest thing we have is the GDPR, but that's for European Union citizens only.
2) >She's making assumptions that all of these studies from data science and usage of recommendation/personalization systems are for her benefit. They're not, she's not paying the bills on that. That's for someone to sell her something.
Advertising (at its best) is for the consumer's benefit. A consumer needs to make informed decisions about their purchases, and they need information disseminated to them to make those decisions. That information being released is advertising.
As a human being, she is entitled to make the case that those who create and control the information dissemination systems don't cause literal terror.
Miscarriages do happen all the time, as kerbalspacepro says. It could be a win-win for companies to realize this and put a bit of time into rebalancing their models. It just takes a little thoughtfulness, and thinking about this sort of thing would be an innovation that could be useful in many contexts. Many people "change state" and advertisers recognizing that change of state rapidly would help optimize their dollars too. See above discussions of people transitioning or deaths.
They do, but they're not the event that the advertisers are looking for.
> Advertising
It's to get the word out about a business's products/serices to entice a financial reward for the business.
Unless she's paying the platform that is showing the ads, she doesn't get the right to dictate the platform's output. She is the product. I.e Youtube red (without ads) vs Youtube.