Click here: www.google.com/ads/preferences/view (via Ta-Nehisi Coates - the follow-up to his nail-on-the-head commentary on Condaleeza Rice, Hillary Clinton and babies)
If your cookies are on, at that handy link you will find the general categories of sites that Google has been creepily watching you visit.
That's mostly pretty boring, because you presumably knew this already - if you are shocked to find what sort of things you do on the internet, that's your own problem - but look a little lower! Check out that bottom item and its explanation -
"Based on the websites you've visited, we think you're interested in topics that mostly interest men."
What is it, do you think? The coupons? The humanities reference sites? The wildlife? (That's adorable baby videos, by the way). The Business and Industrial - Chemicals might be throwing them off (I think that came from a digression after searching for "melamine") but then I've also got cooking and bed and bath.... Really, I can only assume that my minor obsession with webcomics is marking me as masculine.
Is this an assumption - an obviously wrong assumption - based on data? I should hope so, since they're Google... man, I'd love to see that data. And I would really love to know just how many people they've got wrong.
This is more troubling; I recalled reading about it a while back, but a quick search led only to older links. Google might be listening into your computer's microphone to help serve your ads more effectively:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/03/google_eavesdropping_software/
j.
In my Language and Culture class today we were talking about gender, and a site called "gender genie" came up. Apparently it is supposed to be able to determine your gender based on a sample of text that you wrote. My professor, with a disclaimer about "high error rates" typed in "I am a woman."
ReplyDeleteThe genie returned the result of, you guessed it, "male" based on, presumably, how direct a statement like that is.
I'm having a lot of fun with this post.
ReplyDeleteGoogle thinks I'm female, but between the ages of 25-34. A more understandable mistake-- odd though, because the interests they think I have are:
Celebrities & Entertainment News
Music & Audio
Song Lyrics & Tabs
Pop Music
Urban & Hip-Hop
Urban & Hip-Hop - Rap & Hip-Hop
TV & Video - Online Video
Poetry
Newspapers
Philosophy
which is really weird. I sound like a weird person. On gender genie my blog entries come back "female" BUT when I put in the entire text of my senior essay in, it came back "male." a bad thing?