I wish tech companies knew more about me

I worked for Google for 10 years. All of my personal email and all of my work email (back then, Google, now CMU) goes through Gmail. They know basically everything that's ever been sent as a receipt in an email. They know what I watch on YouTube, what I search for Google, and Android's little Google rootkit knows everywhere I go, and by extension, everyone I hang out with. They know I install an adblocker everywhere I can. I rail against advertising and tracking on the internet (this site) all the time.

Yet they don't freaking get it. Google has not discovered that I do not like ads. Advertising (mostly) doesn't work on me. I don't buy the shit that is advertised to me. Sometimes, it's the absolute opposite.

...and yet, on the one device I haven't got an ad blocker on, they insist on showing me ads for stuff I WILL NOT BUY. (one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years--no, no no).

I just don't get it. They expect me to pay for YouTube premium or something, I don't know. I won't pay them.

Google bought my 30s and now they just can't help but nickle-and-dime my mind from here to eternity. It's kind of infuriating. They don't need to know more about me. What they do know about me should be enough!

Targeted advertising will never feel good, and it's not due to lack of information. Consider the following:

- People who know you very well (friends, family, spouse) often buy you bad gifts you need to pretend to be happy to receive

- Ultimately, advertisers aren't _merely_ trying to find things you want. They're trying to get you to buy _their_ things. So someone selling (let's say) hamburgers might be savvy enough to avoid vegetarians, but after that how would they possibly narrow it down? No everyone wants to try out a new burger place, or even cares about advertising when it comes to restaurant suggestions.

ie, they're trying to coerce you into wanting their products, and no amount of targeting can really fix that problem. Also, targeting is difficult.

A very odd stance. Personally if I'm going to be tracked and advertised to I want it to be things I have absolutely no interest in, even better if it's in a language I don't speak.

Not even tracking, but when I land on a page from a Google search, some sites try to be helpful by steering me to a local site, but the local link does not exist so I end up on the homepage, not the specific help I was looking for.

Adobe and Lenovo are really good at this.

Loved that little rant. You had me at "I skip every single electronic track with vocals".

> I live in Helsinki

So, you are protected by the GDPR. There are some types of tracking that are just forbidden or very difficult to implement inside the law.

If you want to stop thinking and let companies decide what is the best for you, your problem is not lack of tracking. Trusting that big corporations will have your best interested in mind seems an odd believe to have in this day and age.

The thing about the language in websites is different. Most websites are created to be used locally. So, they conflagrate language, residence, currencies, etc. It has nothing to do with tracking.

I've been making this point for at least 10y, and I think it's gotten 0% better. It's already infuriating how much data is collected about me against my will and any sense of ethics, but it makes me LIVID that all this invasion of privacy has completely shit results. Pretty sure I'd be more sensitive to advertising if it was fully random, at least I'd see stuff I was curious about or didn't expect I'd be interested in, instead of myriads of variations of things I already bought or that are adjacent to something I bought (and therefore I already have too).

Targeted advertising just has not worked on me or many people - If I'm interested enough to buy something, my digital trail is of that moment and in the process of buying and already sifted through the noise. Ads a week later for some random thing are pointless.

Other daily metrics like from Instagram, etc are not very monetizable as, like great, you know I sometimes doom scroll through Korean pole dancer accounts, etc. What exactly does that help with?

> My user account, system locale, browser locale, and keyboard settings are all set to English. I am logged into Chrome and all Google services. I travel to Germany every few months, and lots of services that I've been using for years suddenly decide I speak German.

This does not require more tracking. This requires LESS tracking - just show the language explicitly requested by the user.

> Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.

This does not require more tracking. Just dont show the screen if there is only one user.

[dead]

[dead]