I wish tech companies knew more about me

"Tech companies are spying on us" is a truism at this point. Endless articles and investigations have ensured that everybody is aware: they are spying on us, they listen to our conversations, they know more about us than we know ourselves, they know you're going to be fired or become pregnant or become depressed before it happens... I have never felt anything close to that. I get shown ads for products I just purchased. All this spying, machine learning, big data result in "he bought a mattress, show him more mattresses". Here, I literally just opened a random website with no adblocker, and I see a purple gamepad I recently purchased, with two other gamepads: When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.…

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