Click to enlarge illustration
Personal reflections by Hal Brown
The ad above was in the text from the OpEd pictured below by Michelle Goldberg: It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Party Now — She embarrasses some Republicans, but she’s no outlier.
I’ve enlarged the items in the ad above which led me to click on it. Below is another ad I checked out.
The umbrella ad on the top was for expensive umbrellas ranging in price from $75 to the top of the line Savile for $350. I clicked on it for the purposes of this essay
The algorithm “knows” I live in Portland where it rains a lot so maybe puts that together with “knowledge” of my disposable income. It (i.e. the algorithm) can tell I’m a Democrat and I think these umbrellas would be favored by affluent Republicans so it isn’t doing perfect targeting. What Democrat would blow $350, let alone $75, on an umbrella? Either that or the placement was random.
The essay Michelle Goldberg makes interesting reading but unfortunately you need a subscription to read it and she really isn't saying anything particularly new. Her conclusion about her Greene needing to be denied any committee assignments is that “Republican members will have the chance to distance themselves from her. If they don’t, it will be because they know she belongs.”
I sometimes have no idea why certain ads seem to be targeted at me. Why did some mathematical program decide I might me interested in spending $275 — $350 for lovely tiny boxes. Could it be that my buying items related to dogs from special canned food to West Highland White Terrier calendars and a fairly expensive television marked me as a dog lover who could afford gold plated box with cute doggies on them and want to buy one?
The ad in my other illustration is from the online catalog of Scully and Scully which is an upscale New York City Park Avenue store. It is the kind of store that my late wife and I might have gone into just for kicks if we were visiting New York. Perhaps their knowledge of me is so deep that their computer “knows” that 25 years ago I bought my wife a sterling sliver Elsa Perreti open heart pendant from Tiffany’s in Boston for her birthday. She saw Kathy Lee Gifford wearing it on Regis and Kathy Lee and admired it. All these years later it is available and considered a classic available only from Tiffany’s. My wife didn't want an engagement ring and the gold wedding band wasn't expensive so at $150 it was the most expensive jewelry I ever bought her.
As for the lovely expensive dog boxes I suppose that would have very briefly tempted to buy one for a special occasion for my wife if she was still alive if it had a Westie on it. I would never have done it though because she wasn't the type to like expensive trinkets or jewelry. If someone robbed our house and thought her jewelry box would be worth stealing he’d be sorely disappointed to find it filled with $5 earrings from the rack at TJ Maxx and brooches or pins from eBay.
Another OpEd about Marjorie Taylor Greene, The GOP once knew what to do about problems like Marjorie Taylor Greene by Colbert I. King, this from The Washington Post, had what seemed to be randomly selected rotating ads. None of them piqued my interest at all, hence I concluded they weren’t generated by algorithms based on my browsing history, this being based on the throw enough stuff at the wall and maybe something will stick theory of advertising.
Likewise, ads seem to rotate on The Washington Post website and some seem totally unrelated to anything that an algorithm might determine would interest me.
It’s possible that ads on sites other than Amazon that seem to relate to me, my browsing, buying history, and demographics are serendipity and totally random. I suppose it is human nature to want succumb to the belief that an algorithm is like a human friend. This is the stuff of all the recent science fiction shows where humans become friends or even lovers with cyborgs.
Hey, I’m lonely, but could I ever get that lonely?
Amazon algorithms suggest items based on prior purchases with a notation that other buyers who bought what you bought also viewed these other items. It is the same as the streaming video services which tell you that other viewers who watched what you did also watched a election of other shows.
Say what you will about the algorithms which collect extensive data about you, if you don’t mind giving up your privacy they can not only be useful on websites like Amazon by suggesting items you might like based on previous purchases, they can also be entertaining.
For those of you who want to avoid being tracked online there are several ways to achieve this. Some will cost you but others simply require changing setting in your browser. The easiest free way to do a safe web search is never to use Google and only use DuckDuckGo.