It’s funny how in this country, the public rhetoric is inundated with people decrying this type of behavior from governments as “big brother” and 1984, but as soon as you slap an inc on the back and make it Big Brother, Inc everyone’s completely fine with it.
Because with corporations you theoretically are able to opt out.
Let me know where I can opt out of Equifax.
There was a article years ago. A young woman started getting Target coupons for diapers and baby formula. A few weeks later she found out she was pregnant. She had been using her loyalty card to make purchases and had bought unscented hand cream and some other low perfume things that apparently are usually purchased by people who are expecting as their sense of smell becomes heightened and the sents become overwhelming.
Honestly I’d like to see a ban on targeted pharmaceutical advertisement. Prescription medication should be between you and your doctor.
And then what they found was that to be more effective was to mix up the suggestions for late term pregnancy / early childhood products with basically random nonsense…
… because if its too obvious that they are highly statistically confident that they know things about you that they shouldn’t, people get weirded out and are less likely to buy something so specifically targeted at them.
They know an insane amount, and they do not want you to know that they know that much.
To play the devil’s advocate, they could be putting that random junk there to see if they can find out other categories of things that you like.
¿Porque no los dos?
Why couldn’t it be both?
Are we sure we can call that targeted pharmaceutical advertisement? It sounds like it could just be the algorithm accidentally discovering a correlation between expecting mothers and preference for unscented hand creams and such.
Unless Amazon did specifically program that in, I think these accidental correlation is not something you can control before it happens and trying to regulate them would be a waste of time and resources.
IIRC, she miscarried and sued for the emotional distress of continued ads which followed the expected development of her (tragically lost) baby.
The republicans would love this technology but they’re to busy trying to figure out how to turn on their TV. What’s the wire thing in the back of it supposed to do? What about the little black brick with letters on it? It doesn’t even say anything useful like WTF is 123? 456? 789? I get it seven ate nine! It gets this one, its funny 🤣! Anyway it will take some time before the republicans could make use of tech like that… unless evil people help them.
Ohh, there’s plenty of IT people that are Republican. There are just less IT jobs in the rural areas.
Also most medium- plus sized businesses have conservative-minded owners and they all need IT staff either in-house or rental.
But how do you know if a prescription is right for you if you can’t ask your doctor today! /s
The only thing that sounds sketchier than an Amazon drug marketplace is a Temu drug marketplace.
Temu drugs would ship in a Ziploc sandwich bag with the name of the drug misspelled in black sharpie on a piece of tan masking tape stuck to it.
When I switched to Amazon pharmacy all I had to do was give them my name and birthday they were instantly able to find my insurance provider all of my active meds at my current pharmacy and order refill and switch pharmacy to Amazon all within 5 or 6 clicks. You can assume they already had this info from one way or another and the me clicking permissions was theater
To be fair though, that’s pretty much any pharmacy system. I just switched my main pharmacy over last year, and it’s basically the same process.
Before I even knew I had gonorrhea, Alexa was recommending me penicillin. She also recommended I stay away from the local brothels. And to lay off the whiskey. Also, Alexa is my doctor.
“you’re going to die. but first, renew your prime subscription.”
Was the advice prescriptive or subscriptive?
it’s wild to me that just advertising drugs is legal in the first place.
It’s legal in US but not in most other countries
it’s only fully legal in the US and NZ. all other countries either outright ban it out have restrictions.
In case people forgot:
https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/
They (basically any large online retailer or advertiser) are, in fact, listening to everything you say near your phone, near your alexa, your echo, your smart device.
Linking heard words and phrases with your known shopping activity + a gigantic dataset + statistical analysis = they can predict all kinds of things about you, with shockingly high accuracy, and thus aim products at you.
You know how archaeologists and detectives can make a decent profile of a person or group’s daily lifestyle by analyzing your garbage?
Welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia version of that.
Besides the fact that present-day battery technology makes this impossible, modern smartphones display a very obvious indicator when apps are using the microphone.
Hotword detection notwithstanding, as that happens at the hardware level.
with shockingly high accuracy, and thus aim products at you.
I’m still waiting for a single targeted add to be something I want, the best they’ve done so far is try and sell me things I already own.
