It's always fun checking Google's ad settings and seeing what they think I'm into.

Apparently now I'm into baseball, flowers, boating, celebrities, country music, credit cards, geology, event ticket sales, fishing, and windows OS. Among a couple hundred other things. It even gets some rather basic facts (marital status, company size, education) wrong. I seriously wonder how they generate this profile?

Check your Google ad settings here...

https://adssettings.google.com/

Well... It actually got some categories right, but I don't really feel that's very impressive considering that it put me in every category by the looks of it.

There's not a lot there for me. Just some generic whether I want to see alcohol and gambling ads on youtube.

With these many categories, it is bound to match me somewhat.

> I seriously wonder how they generate this profile

Poorly!

It can have this problem even if you are not nonbinary. Buy a few toe rings and have it decide you're a woman...

It fascinates me to see how the ad algorithm responds to people who watch content in multiple languages. I study a lot of languages as a hobby, so I often watch YouTube videos that are in Mandarin, like news broadcasts and niche hobby channels. YouTube has now started showing me ads (in Mandarin) which seem to be targeted to Mandarin-speaking immigrant parents of young children who want a way to teach them Mandarin despite my, and my spouse’s, very busy careers. I find this amusing because I am a single, pasty white man in my 20s.

That’s just Spotify. Many years ago they had a little tool that actually reported what demographic slots it pegged you at based on your listening preferences. The top two hits for me were 1.) early 20s, college educated, White, woman 2.) 60+, blue collar, African American, male

At the time I was a late 20s, college educated, South Asian male. I’m very cis and very straight. And yeah my musical tastes are pretty eclectic, but that was a weird profile to settle me on.

Some people fit in convenient buckets, but lots of people don't, and assuming all people do, will make the ad system useless to a lot of people. Even if you're not non-binary at all, you could still be a successful businesswoman or a Spanish-speaking houseman (househusband? stay-at-home dad?).

Better to just follow people's interests, instead of using their interests to incorrectly pigeonhole them and then drawing incorrect generalisations from that.

Here's another less harmless aspect of that:

Something about my actual interests and activity apparently makes youtube think I'm into Fox news and all the crazy shit found there.

Now, who else has this same value judgement about me? This assessment that I neither declared for myself nor even ratified.

It's annoying but ultimately harmless that youtube shows me conservative wackjob stuff.

But is that same profile in someone else's database that marks me as someone to watch or something? Does it affect my insurance rates, my liklihood to get extra scrutiny when travelling, my ability to purchase or register a firearm, my access to jobs that might be extra sensitive or responsible, basically any of the things where someone either private or the state does any sort of background or credit check on you for any reason, and there are really many of those when you think a out it.

I'm guessing, today, it's probably not really affecting my life in any real way, but, there is no way it makes any sense to say that will still be true tomorrow.

There was that infamous case of a retailer figuring out someone was pregnant before they did based on what they were buying and mailing a customized flyer...to their dad's house. I don't remember the exact situation, but it probably wasn't the only incident.

That btw is an anecdote from the association mining community.

I spent a lot of time learning about association rule mining in my AI courses, including the implementation details of competing ways to mine them. The technique seems extremely useful and fascinating (I jury rigged it for on the fly league of legends champ recommendations to maximize calculated win rate change given limited information), but I almost never see it used in the real world or even see it talked about anymore.

What happened to association rule mining?

I believe you're referring to a rumor (which may be true, I just mean it in the sense that it's out there and not something you or I have verified) about Target.

And the harm like what I'm saying was that her father was informed of her medical condition through that mechanism rather than from her.