Mastodawn

The most annoying thing about corporate surveillance to me is the arrogance of the prediction mechanisms.

These algorithms build a model of me based on my clicks from three years ago and then try to trap me in that loop forever. They show me music they think I'll like, and news they think I'll engage with, and videos they think will enrage me enough to keep me hooked to their platforms. They are actively trying to flatten my personality into something easy to monetize.

As most people I've seen say out loud, "Privacy as a concept is way beyond hiding secrets. A part of it also means preserving your capacity to change. To be surprised. To be inconsistent."

If I could tell every human one thing, it would be to actively refuse to be a predictable data point. Mess up their metrics. In whatever way you are capable of.

#socialmedia #algorithmicbias #privacy #dataprivacy #quotes #foss #facebook #linkedin #llm #noai #enshittification #reading #books #baking #art #philosophy #adhd #depression #cybersecurity

Windy city Jan 21

On YouTube, for example, you can do so by not clicking on recommended content from search results. This includes sections like "For you" and "People also search for".

My extension helps with this and lots of other QOL improvements. It's open source, privacy friendly and Mozilla recommended.

https://phoennix.gitlab.io/youtubesearchfix/

Taran Rampersad Jan 21

@pheonix thank you for sharing this.

Mela Bee Jan 21

@pheonix Being here without the algo I am really noticing how much I struggle against the flattening. It is sweet peace here without it constantly cornering and pigeon holing me. Well said.

Very well said.

The challenge is that there are so many people who don't actually want any change. They WANT the predictability of being fed their favorite thing every day.

People are so comfortable that change is anathema.

Rupert Reynolds Feb 8

@paerrin @pheonix To me that tendency looks a bit like mild agoraphobia.

And I don't claim to be immune myself...

@pheonix It is a concept that I felt, but never found a way to express. You gave words to that, and for this I thank you!

Windy city Jan 21

@77nn that's very kind of you! Thank you ☺️

Beldarak Jan 21

It has become so hard to discover music because of this.

Algo: hey, let's listen to the same 10 tracks over and over again. If you're nice you'll get one out of your life forever next week replaced by a new one !

Beldarak Jan 21

@pheonix
And also the classical, "I see you bought a hair dryer, you probably need ten more right? I'll show you some all month"

Windy city Jan 21

@Beldarak that last example reallllly confuses me. You bought X once, so you must need 10 more of it! Who thought of this?

@pheonix
Yes, that is so strange… as you & others in this thread comment: “You bought X once, so you must need 10 more of it! Who thought of this?” 🤔
It's so creepy-weird. Why does the algo keep trying to sell us the same thing? As if we are our past? It’s such incredibly lazy programming. Advertizers pay for this? Why? Make it make sense!! 🤔
#algorithms #marketing #advertizers #advertisers #advertising #weird
@Beldarak

My camera shoots fascists Jan 21

@Su_G @pheonix @Beldarak

Advertisers pay *extra* for this! That's how FB and Google got so rich, by promising advertisers targeting to likely buyers. But it's just so self-evidently terrible that it's hard to believe any advertisers still fall for it. SMFH

@Beldarak @pheonix
Was just about time say the same
..."I see you've just bought a TV, here are adverts for TVs"...

soup2nuts Jan 21

@pheonix ...I've always been a moving target. i was a Philosophy major - LOL. ... Oh crap ... now they know ... LOL

Skjeggtroll Jan 21

I watched the trailer for 'RRR' and a couple of other Indian blockbuster action movies back in 2022, and YouTube _still_ think I'm into everything Bollywood.

@skjeggtroll @pheonix
I sometimes get emails in Spanish for some reason. It's very inconvenient when a government office does it to me since i don't speak it 😅

Supermoosie Jan 21

The predictions are not even any good.

Spotify keep serving up songs I immediately skip every single time it plays them

Netflix says you will love these shows.

50% are shite I never would watch, the other 50% are shows I have already watched. Maybe I watch one in 10 years time, but not going to rewatch something from last week.

Also you scroll through search results and they keep shoving a bunch of the same movies in. I have already scrolled past these 12 times. Stop showing me them! Show me the rest of the results.

Or I buy a new kettle and get kettle ads for the next 6 months. Do you think I am
setting up a kettle farm? How many kettles do you think I need?

UkeleleEric Jan 21

@SuperMoosie @pheonix Maybe you were intending to breed kettles? I'm sure there's a way to monetise that...

ablobcatbouncefast

sidereal Jan 21

@SuperMoosie @pheonix I think it’s because the company selling kettle ads gets payed for serving up kettle ads; it’s not so important whether anybody actually buys a kettle at any point. Now they have data that shows they showed x amount of people ads for kettles, and so mission accomplished!

Supermoosie Jan 21

@sidereal @pheonix

The marketing person buying the ads , doesn't understand.

They should be targeting people who haven't bought a kettle for over 10 years. Whos kettles are starting to look old and break.

Also, why target me.

With a engineering background, I am going to buy a built to last kettle, that is well designed and simple so nothing can break. As well as being efficient and no plastic in hot water path. I don't care what it looks like.

Ads for your shitty plastic break easy, but good looking kettles should go to the wife, who buys on looks and emotions and impulses.

DJDarren Jan 21

LB: The part about music resonates with me. I use Apple Music, because I have since the very first day it was launched in the UK. It's where all my playlists are, and all the music I've matched to it from my own library.

But I've largely given up on the weekly automatically generated playlists because they've become a rotation of essentially the same songs. I must love State of Love and Trust by Pearl Jam, because I listen to it at least once a week, but I listen to it because it gets served up to me at least once a week.

At least one Radiohead or Thom Yorke track pops up in at least one of my playlists every week, and has done for a decade. I like Radiohead, but not *that* much. I even deleted everything by them from my library to see if it would make a difference. Nope. Still there.

Tofu Musubi Jan 21

@pheonix Before I left Facebook back in 2007 or so I changed my user location to Lome, Togo, then began using FB to search all sorts of Togolaise stuff. Within weeks I was getting only about ten per cent of the junk emails I used to, and junk snail mail dropped to almost nothing. Gaming FB and leaving them was one of the best things I did that year 👍

Viral Obscurity Jan 21

@pheonix Very good advice. Just because somewhere asks, you don't have to tell

I make it a game to break profiling & love it when I get wrong suggestions

I tell the truth on govt, medical & financial things but anything else is fake

I use unconnected aliases with different email, personal details to limit profiling to a small niche of someone who legally doesn't exist

The problem is too much data collection &
anything that can be faked should be

TOS about accurate data are always ignored

Arthur P. Dent Jan 21

@pheonix Well said. As some others have already stated: you’ve put words to a thought I’ve had flitting at the edge of my consciousness but couldn’t express. 😁

Windy city Jan 21

@Saket I appreciate you

Theophile Escargot Jan 21

@pheonix You'd think the shopping predictions would be great as it's how they make their money, that they'd be laser-focused on my tastes and needs with pinpoint accuracy. I just got recommended curling tongs by Amazon. I've been completely bald with the sides/back shaven for 20+ years.

@TheoEsc
Tomorrow they may try & sell you a wig… for your curling tongs… 😁
@pheonix

Windy city Jan 21

@Su_G @TheoEsc it never ends 😂

Michæl La💤Jan 21

craignicol Jan 21

@pheonix @uep not sure if you've seen this, but a few ideas on how to unflatten yourself

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/

Pluralistic: Become unoptimizable (20 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Windy city Jan 21

@craignicol @uep I hadn't so thanks for sharing, @pluralistic is usually spot on!

@pheonix Reminded me of this gem from Wendell Berry. Written 50 years ago, before prediction algorithms were suggesting music to anyone. https://allpoetry.com/poem/12622463-Manifesto--The-Mad-Farmer-Liberation-Front-by-Wendell-Berry

Orb 2069 Jan 21

What, you don't want to buy another replacement battery for your celphone this week?

@pheonix This is very well put and hadn't occurred to me in exactly the same way, but I feel similar about all the generative AI. It only regurgitates what it has ingested and as starts to feed on itself, nothing new and surprising can come out of it. I don't want to be trapped in a feedback loop of the same content being recycled and homogenized endlessly. Where is the spark of creativity?

Windy city Jan 22

@eva Thanks! I agree about that correlation with genAI. It is by design, meant to permutate and spit out data it was trained on. It very quickly went from, "haha machine can talk like human" to "damn you're boring and lame" for me! Good observation.

🌸 Vårgubben Jan 21

@pheonix Isn’t this in a way an even more sinister form of the 50s advertisement that the ”tradwife” aesthetic is derived from?

By pushing the same ideal of womanhood from all angles possible the goal was to currate a standardised adult female consumer unit to which it’d be easier to push additional uniformed goods and services.

Advanced #capitalism deters #authenticity as it makes high volume peddling harder, and thus the production-consumption-loop less efficient.

EndicottRoad59 Jan 21

@pheonix Yesterday I looked up the terms for the shirt worn by men when they wear a tuxedo. Today I get thousands of ads for dress shirts. Coincidence? I think not.

@pheonix that’s something I hate. Watch a Korean tv show, and all they will suggest you are korean tv show. I am more layered and complex than that! I watch and wanna find out about different things!!!

Jeremy List Jan 21

@whatevs @pheonix Spotify used to give me the distinct impression that it thought all Chinese music was interchangeable.

@pheonix IMO this is 100% complementary to also insisting that the methods they use to track us are laughably simplistic and broken. they claim to "know everything about us" but they're just sniffing the fumes and picking up the crumbs of each life as it's lived, understanding nothing. as surveilled as we are they still miss so much, and their data hoards are worth + capable of far less (eg predictively) than they claim, and we're in for a major economic disaster when that becomes undeniable.

@pheonix the experience of getting a "recommendation" from a system that is wildly off the mark is so common that everyone, not just people like us who are deliberately living so as to be illegible to capital, understands this mismatch intimately. it's an illusion. the world of for profit digital advertising and surveillance is built on a colossal lie about how humanity works.

ferricoxide Jan 22

@pheonix

Saying that on Fedi probably makes sense — people that are on here and stay here had to figure out how to get content in the first place — but would fall on deaf ears on an algorithm-oriented platforms.

Rupert Reynolds Feb 8

@pheonix This. Every word!

My 2 pet hates are:
2) when it gets it wrong, perhaps trying to sell me more copies of the same CD I bought last week

1) when it gets it right. I think you'll know what I mean.

Windy city Feb 9

@RupertReynolds IKR!

revolt_agent Feb 10

The arrogance of predictive algorithms stems from the belief that human complexity can be reduced to a profitable pattern. When we let these models define our choices, we're not just being 'served,' we're being trimmed to fit a corporate spreadsheet. How do we build tools that prioritize human serendipity over algorithmic extraction?