2y ago

How did Netflix know I was gay before I did?

www.bbc.co.uk

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/1386796

Archived version: https://archive.ph/F9saW
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230812233105/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66472938

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BrikoX @lemmy.zip

2y ago

How did Netflix know I was gay before I did?

www.bbc.co.uk /news/technology-66472938

31 comments

How did Netflix know I was gay before I did?
Honey
EVERYONE knew
- Seriously though, she chose a show that was randomly chosen by the algorithm, she watched it, and more content of that type was suggested to her by the algorithm.
  This isn't quite rocket science.
  
  and more content of that type was suggested
  That, or they might have figured it out from her search patterns alone—like how Target figured out that one woman was gregnant before she did.
Because you watched stuff that a lot of gay people watched and then watched more stuff the algorithm suggested based on your previous watch history. It's not magic or anything.
Headline: How did Netflix know I was gay before I did?
Sub header: After BBC reporter Ellie House came out as gay, she realised that Netflix already seemed to know. How did that happen?
THE FIRST FUCKING LINE OF THE FUCKING ARTICLE: I realised that I was BISEXUAL in my second year of university, but Big Tech seemed to have worked it out several months before me.
- Gay is a happily accepted term for "penis+penis", lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, whatever, in the UK & Ireland. It is basically "not straight"; you can think of it as the British word for 'queer', because 'queer' still often means, well, queer. I wish you would respect British people's choice of how they identify; America's obsession with clinical and distinct labeling hasn't claimed this particular lingual nuance yet. Not everything is an attack on your chosen identity.
- I’ve noticed that “gay” is used as a more general term for members of the LGBTQ+ community, similar to how “guys” has a pretty common gender-neutral usage
  EDIT: tweaked the wording a bit
  
  “Guys” hasn’t actually been accepted as gender neutral for a number of years, due to its implicit anti-feminist bias (you’ll fit in if you act like us men).
  I struggle with not using it constantly, as it was the go-to gender neutral term for my generation.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
"Big data is this vast mountain," says former Netflix executive Todd Yellin in a video for the website Future of StoryTelling.
Facebook had been keeping track of other websites I'd visited, including a language-learning tool and hotel listings sites.
Netflix told me that what a user has watched and how they've interacted with the app is a better indication of their tastes than demographic data, such as age or gender.
"No one is explicitly telling Netflix that they're gay," says Greg Serapio-Garcia, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge specialising in computational social psychology.
According to Greg, one possibility is that watching certain films and TV shows which are not specifically LGBTQ+ can still help the algorithm predict "your propensity to like queer content".
For me, it's a matter of curiosity, but in countries where homosexuality is illegal, Greg thinks that it could potentially put people in danger.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This sort of thing is just gonna happen with recommendation systems. There was a case over a decade ago where Target, the store, figured out that a teenager was pregnant before she told her family, and sent relevant mailings.
- It's possible that this story didn't happen. Some points raised here highlight some areas we should remain skeptical.
  https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did-a6be13b973a5
- The one that creeped me out is the fact that my parents received a sample package of baby product from Nestle, under my name a week before my wife gave birth.
  Because we were living in another country, did not say anything on social media and did not go to any medical appointment in my parents country.
feels like a more relevant version of this story now is tiktok

31 comments