Have the Algorithms Gone too Far?
YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook target ads are more obvious than ever and it appears they don’t intended to stop.
Five years ago it was a popular ‘conspiracy’ to say “they are listening” or “they can track us through our phones”. Today I think that is just common knowledge. After companies had been exposed, the obvious move would have been to slow down the ever-so-obvious overzealous data mining, but from my own experiences, it has become obvious that companies have continued to get more intense. There’s been a million examples in my life, but this happened yesterday.
Yesterday my friend and I were feeling a bit nostalgic and decided to binge-watch the first season of George Lopez. If you haven’t seen it you absolutely must. It is one of the funniest shows, but it did feel odd not seeing Nick@Night in the corner of the screen. Today my roommate started getting a lot of George Lopez reels on his TikTok home page. (As we’ve experienced many times in the past.) The day before we were walking in the rice aisle at H.E.B. and I was not feeling well so he made multiple jokes about me eating some spicy rice, and before we could even sleep a peep that night he was getting ads for rice on multiple platforms. Why are they being so obvious? Back in the day, there would be ‘random coincidences where my family and I might talk about camping and then days or a week later we might get a bunch of tent ads, but now within hours target ads are springing to our social media. For example, when I came here today to do my very first Substack rant I had to go to the bottom of page one just to find the correct website after searching it word for word. I can’t help but wonder why it would be even lower on the google search engine after millions of his listeners, like myself, learned about it on Joe Rogan and started using it.
Recently Joe Rogan made a video and a trend began of people reading the Tik Tok user agreement. Here is what is stated: “We collect certain information about the device you use to access the platform, such as your IP address, user region, user agent, mobile carrier, time zone settings, identifiers for advertising purpose, model of device, device system, network type, device ids, screen resolution, and operating system, apps, and file names and types, keystroke patterns or rhythms, battery state, audio setting, connected audio device where you log in from multiple devices; we will be able to use your profile information to identify your activity across devices. we may also associate you with information collected from devices other than those you used to log into the platform.” Make of that what you will, but I find it quite scary.
Joe Rogan reading TikTok terms of services.
While ads and memes are not a big deal, it has to make you wonder how much of what we do and say do they really have a transcript of, and what do these companies have access to in each of our lives? Is this the digital age of spying or do companies just want to make their sites as addicting as possible? Most likely we will never know, but one thing we do know is that they clearly do not plan on stopping anytime soon.