Goddam I had to read that headline 3 times before I understood the implication!
That is outright disgusting, and such practices ought to be outlawed.
Or as Trump would say, very cool and very legal way to make money.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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Wonder how much of a bonus the sick fuck who pitched that got for the idea?
Probably nothing. Most likely, a paid consultant to give ideas. And if it was a worker, they were just doing their job and at most got a "great job, keep up the good work," praise email.
Who the fuck comes up with this stuff?
The most generous assumption is that they use statistics to determine correlations like this (e.g., deleted selfies resulted in a high CTR for beauty ads so they made that a part of their algo). The least generous interpretation is exactly what you're thinking: an asshole came up with it because it's logical and effective.
Either way, ethics needs to be a bigger part of the programmers education. And we, as a society, need to make algorithms more transparent (at least social media algorithms). Reddit's trending algorithm used to be open source during the good ole days.
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This type of advertising isn’t new. There is that famous (although the claims from the father have been questioned) New York Times article written by Charles Duhigg in 2012. A father of a teenage girl in Minnesota got upset for receiving coupons from Target for infant care related products. As the story goes, he later learned his daughter was in fact pregnant. It turns out Target was using some predictive algorithm to identify would-be mothers and straight up sending them coupons for infant care products. It seems ever since this article was published that they stopped doing this in such a direct manner. Again, there have people who questioned the validity of the claims for this specific story, but Target did confirm they were doing this.
My doctor's office (allegedly) handed my info to a plastic surgery clinic so they could send me a "happy 40th birthday, now fix your sagging bullshit!"-email the literal day I turned 40.
Needless to say that put a damper on things.
People have been doing evil shit for money since the invention of money. These days it's just automated.
I'd call my former Dr's office and flip my shit. Them giving out your info may have been a HIPAA violation. You should really follow up and harass the fuck out of them.
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Be aware that the companies would have paid Facebook handsomely to identify users in this way. The world we live in has a sickness with greed for money at its heart.
That's some cartoon villain level shit jfc
Added to idcaboutprivacy (which is open source). If there are any other similar links, feel free to add them or send them my way.
even a scathing rant about surveillance capitalism becomes fodder for the machine, as you can clearly see with the ads on this page.
Ads? I can see no ads...