The Gillian Brockell letter (see previous post) can be read as a consumer complaint letter but also a love letter to the tech industry.
Reader Antonio R. who forwarded the column to me via Twitter raised this interesting question:
Her conclusion seems to be: more relevant ads is better than no ads at all. What future is waiting for cheated fe/males? A warning "Be careful to your partner" or a reassuring "All is well" to choose in advance among app settings?
Gillian is someone who totally buys into the tech industry's "big data" pitch - that the more you share, the more you gain. She's writing tags that cue algorithms to send her relevant ads. Presumably, when she was pregnant, she was satisfied with the ads that at the time were selling her relevant products.
She's mad that the algorithm is not all-knowing, personalized and omnipotent. She expects that Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, etc. tracks her every move, and optimizes her experience just for her. She's angry when it makes mistakes.
And, if one reads behind the lines, her proposed solution is for the tech industry to be even more creepy, gather even more personal data, be even more personalized. She wants ads, just not the ones she doesn't like.
This solution is not radical at all. In fact, it is exactly what tech firms have been doing for 10 years. The "theory" is: data make ads more relevant, and if ads are not relevant enough, it is because they do not have enough personal data. In this sense, Gillian's column is a love letter to the tech industry.
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The overlooked solution is to have less relevant ads or no ads at all.
In the Charles Duhigg story about Target's pregnancy prediction model (see Numbersense), one of the curious nuggets we learned is that the data scientists deliberately mixed random products in between the pregnancy goods being marketed to the women predicted to be pregnant. The official explanation was to make the brochures appear less creepy.
In the book, I suggested a different explanation for that decision. In a predictive model like that, there are likely to be multiples more false positives (i.e. women wrongly predicted to be pregnant and thus sent irrelevant materials) than true positives (i.e. women correctly predicted to be pregnant). I also speculated that many true positives would act like Gillian did - appreciating the pregnancy product ads as relevant rather than creepy. However, I believe that the false positives will complain that the pregnancy product ads are irrelevant, maybe even somewhat offensive.
Mixing in other products lessens the bad of the wrong predictions - but simultaneously, it will also soften the impact of the correct predictions. What's in the balance is consumer interests versus advertiser business goals.
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