When Profiling Goes Wrong 626
huskymo writes "This morning's Wall Street Journal is carrying a funny story on TiVo and Amazon's automatic customer profiling. As most Slashdot readers probably know, TiVo keeps track of which programs you record and--if you haven't told it not to--records other programs it thinks you'd like. The article describes users that TiVo's mistaken for Korean, for gay, even for "a pregnant gay man.""
Funny as hell.
error checking? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:error checking? (Score:3, Funny)
You got something against pregnant gay Korean men?
Re:error checking? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Profiling does not work... (Score:3, Interesting)
Define "does not work." I think profiling often does work, not with 100% accuracy, but it does work. The more data you give it, the better the output you get. Profiling with a very low n is bound to be silly, but as you increase it the results get better.
Profiling is just a statistical correlation (or probably a more complicated type of factor analysis) that says people who like X,Y,Z also tend to like A,B,C. Yes, aberrant data (buying a needlepoint kit for my aunt) can skew the results, but again as the amount of info goes up, the ability of such outlying points to skew decreases. I am more and more impressed with both tivo and amazon's picks as the amount of data it uses increases (even more by tivo, as it is getting a rather split personality input between my picks & my gf's).
point out what people really want is contextual information at the moment
Sometimes. Somtimes people want a list related only to the current action, such as when buying presents. On other occasions, they want a recommendation based on previous likes as well.
Profiling could be used to predict what you want when you ask for it. For example if you are making a query for children's books then the top 10 could be presented. Or a couple of questions could be asked and then a top 10 is presented. But in either case the background of the user is not taken into account.
But why not use the background? Why should I have to repeatedly answer questions to give it information that could be obtained passively?
For different situations, different methods will work better. For things that tend to be more personal (tivo), profiling is great. For things that aren't (gifts from amazon), context would be better. But to say 'profiling doesnt work.' is just wrong. [evidence, look at the ultimate profiling: car insurance...]
-Ted
Re:error checking? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:error checking? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:error checking? (Score:5, Funny)
IE: the pregnant wife, and the in-the-closet gay husband?
Man, this does have TV show written all over it.
Programming 102 (Score:5, Informative)
A bitmap is a data structure where a collection of bits is stored. This allows for more compact storing of information. For example a 32 bit word can be used to store 32 true-false values. This is more efficient than storing an array of 32 bytes with TRUE or FALSE in them. Bitmaps are not limited to storing true-false data. A 32 bit word can store 8 four bit values as well.
In the pregnant gay man example, the bitmap likley had bits for male/female, gay/straight and pregnant. Set them all to 1's and you get a pregnant homosexual male.
Uninitialized variables are caused when a function accesses a variable before explicitly setting it. This is a common problem in C/C++ and can result in some odd behavior. An uninitialized variable could result in the bits being set even though the program never explicitly set them.
Hence (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hence (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hence (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hence (Score:4, Funny)
Or more likely even would be that the police would show up with some estrogen injections for you.
-You- "Who is it?"
-Police- "It's the police sir"
-You- "Ummm.. can I help you?"
-Police- "We're here with some estrogen sir."
-You- "Why?"
-Police- "Well, we received a disturbing 911 from your Tivo, it said your testicles needed to be taken back a notch."
Re:Hence (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd also bet that Tivo doesn't have a "Terrorist" tag...
True, and I don't think the profiling data is centrally stored either. (But I don't have a Tivo, so I wouldn't know.)
However, can you imagine the kind of bad assumptions some people might make if they knew someone regularly watched "The Quaran Today" and other Muslim religious programming?
Can't afford it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Can't afford it (Score:3, Informative)
as a pregnant gay man... (Score:4, Funny)
what? (Score:3, Funny)
what does "a pregnant gay man" like to watch?
That sounded anti-TiVo (Score:5, Informative)
not anti-Tivo (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That sounded anti-TiVo (Score:3, Funny)
Basically my TiVo seems to think I'm a violent (sopranos) child (simpsons) chef (iron chef). This means I get mostly random cooking shows and cartoons that I have no interest in whatsoever. Lately its obsessed with trying to get me to watch dexter's laboratory.
Re:That sounded anti-TiVo (Score:5, Informative)
It's a piece of hardware with software written by human beings. It isn't empathic. All it knows at this point is that you like the simpsons, soprano's, and iron chef. So obviously with what little it knows the unit is hypothesizing that you like cartoons, cooking shows, and mob based tv shows. Shouldn't be terribly surprising when you get random cartoon and cooking shows recorded as suggestions.
If you don't want suggestions at all, it's incredibly easy to turn them off.
Re:That sounded anti-TiVo (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That sounded anti-TiVo (Score:3, Informative)
You don't go searching through the guide listing finding programs that seem like the opposite of the suggestion you didn't like. Why? Because the Tivo doesn't know that you didn't like the suggestion it recorded.
When you first get a tivo the suggestions are pretty bad. This is reasonable; the unit doesn't have much data to go off of. Use it for a month or two using the thumbs up/down ratings properly, and the suggestions are pretty good. When I run out of "normal" tv to watch, I can scroll down to the recorded suggestions and 9 times out of 10 there will be something down there that I want to watch. The other 1/10th of the time there is something down there that I would normally watch but am not in the mood for...
Re:That sounded anti-TiVo (Score:3, Interesting)
I watch "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" every Tuesday, but have no interest in "Clueless", "Charmed" or "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", as I am neither a teenaged girl, nor am I obsessed with them.
A properly configured TiVo would see that I like "Buffy" & "The Sopranos" and realize that thoughtful writing is what captures my attention, making reccomendations like "The Industry" when its on PBS (That's the US title for "Made In Canada", the funniest and smartest damn sitcom I've ever seen.)
Re:That sounded anti-TiVo (Score:3, Informative)
The TiVo can use all of these things in some formula to come up with the recommendations, not just the genre/subgenre (though there are six levels of that too, in the data). Whether or not it does, I don't know.
A poll... (Score:3, Funny)
J.
What products exactly does one market to ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What products exactly does one market to ... (Score:5, Funny)
Working link w/o registration (Score:5, Informative)
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB10382619
Re:Working link w/o registration (Score:5, Interesting)
That really is quite funny. I think we've hit on a new tech-term: counterprogramming - noun - to use the front-end of a software program to perform operations with which the backend program should have been able to do in the first place.
Re:Working link w/o registration (Score:3, Informative)
Amazing! (Score:3, Funny)
If I replace just one word and remove just two others, we have the definition of politics:
counterprogramming - noun - to use the front-end of a software program to perform operations with which the backend program should have been able to do in the first place.
...becomes...
politics - noun - to use the front-end of a person to perform operations with which the backend should have been able to do in the first place.
Re:Working link w/o registration (Score:5, Informative)
Good first cut, but I think a better definition would be:
counterprogramming - mitigating the erroneous behavior of a computer system by applying unusual or inconsistent inputs; counteracting the effect of badly designed software by placing the system in a state where the malfunctioning component is disabled or overridden, usually via specially designed inputs
Good enough for the Hacker dictionary?
There was a free link from obscurestore.com (Score:3, Informative)
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB10382619
No Hablo Espanol (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No Hablo Espanol (Score:3, Informative)
SPAM profiling is the worst! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:SPAM profiling is the worst! (huh huh) (Score:5, Funny)
Whatever you do, don't look behind you.
Dude, you should make a note of your own sig when posting something like this!
Profile My Dog (Score:5, Funny)
As direct marketing has become more intrusive into my life, I've taken to using my dog's name in various business dealings. She has name which was a popular name for girls about, oh, 80 years ago. (Like Brittany, Ashley and Nicole will be about 70 years from now.)
At any rate, I get this phone message for Violet from a retirement home in Phoenix.
They were "updating their records" and they "haven't heard from you in a while" and wanted to make sure she know about all the "wonderful plans they had" for their retirement community.
It reminded me of college days when the dorm would subscribe to publications under the moniker of Omar The Goat.
Re:Profile My Dog (Score:5, Insightful)
Keeping track of the "flow of information" you're handing out is a fascinating thing. I once invented a company name to reserve a domain for. This was in the dark ages, when a popular top level domains was upkept by someone using a "vi" and who was rejecting domain names he disliked. As "fantasy" names were refused, i made up a company named like the domain i wanted to get. Unluckily i used my home address.
The name and address together was never used again by me. But this company still gets magazines, advertisement, business proposals (not only from Nigeria) and (during the .boom era) once even got an offer for a takeover.
Even if i should drop dead immediately, this name would continue to live and be responsible for the slaughter of complete forests.
So be carefull when you invent names. Like ghosts they may come when you call but not leave when not wellcome any more.
Yours, Martin
staying on the subject (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks to me as if they simply look at the genre of the program you rate high and then take that to be your preference.
I found out that the hard way, one day I went home and I found the tivo filled with idiotic shows like: "Price is right" and "Spend $1000 in 1 minute", "Blind date" etc... upon investigating I realized that I've have rated "Junkyard Wars" (a competition of building things from junk) and "BattleBots" (remote controlled robot fight show) high the previous day, this triggered the game-show category to be recorded.
As Larry David would say: pretty-pretty-pretty dumb.
Re:staying on the subject (Score:5, Funny)
Re:staying on the subject (Score:5, Interesting)
I recommend trying it again. Give an explicit two-thumbs up to anything that you really like and three thumbs up to the two things you think are the best shows/movies on. Leave the default on-thumb for everything that you set up to record, but set anything to neutral that you record on speculation.
I find that 50-60% of the stuff it records for me is junk, which is a much better rate than surfing channels, at least in my experience.
a roommate (Score:5, Funny)
I was secretly hoping TiVo would turn me gay as a result (Hello lawsuit!) Naturally, you can understand why I was disapointed when a few days later I realized that I was still attracted to women.
It's not just TiVo and Amazon... (Score:5, Funny)
"If you like MAC OS X Developer's Guide you may also enjoy:
Bridget Jones's Diary
Hardcover, 1998
Helen Fielding
$3.75 (Save $19.20)
At Home in Mitford
Paperback, 1996
Jan Karon
$1.00 (Save $11.95)
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
Hardcover Textbook, 1999
Melissa Bank, Melissa Banks
$2.25 (Save $21.70)"
Re:It's not just TiVo and Amazon... (Score:4, Funny)
>
> "If you like MAC OS X Developer's Guide you may also enjoy:
>
>Bridget Jones's Diary [...]
>
>At Home in Mitford [...]
>
>The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing [...]
So half.com definitely thinks you're gay, but doesn't know whether you're male or female?
Wow, marketers really are dumber than advertised.
It would be great .... (Score:3, Insightful)
... if the submitter had read the article. From the submitter:
From the article:
Now even the submitters don't read the articles.
Re:It would be great .... (Score:3, Interesting)
Please ensure your brain is fully in place before engaging your loud, rude mouth, next time.
Interesting coincidence??? (Score:5, Funny)
One is not born a woman, one becomes one. -- Simone de Beauvoir
Apparently, this is how it happens!
How to read **any** WSJ article, Free (Score:5, Informative)
Copy the URL, and change
online.wsj.com/article/...
to
online.wsj.com/article_email/...
(yes, that's: sed -e s/article/article_email/ )
Funniest Personalization Suggestion (Score:5, Funny)
Where to next? (Score:5, Funny)
Motorist: Umm, no
Trooper: I got an email alert from TiVo alerting me that you've been taping the Fast & the Furious, Fast Lane, Gone in 60 seconds, and other shows that match a repeat speeders profile.
Motorist: ummm. I think that was my son...
Trooper: No, sir it correlates with your EzPass acitivity as well. Please step out of the car...
Stupid Profiling (Score:4, Insightful)
The key thing is not to profile for things that will offend people unless there's an opt-in somewhere: sexuality, religious beliefs, etc. And the filters for language are obviously way off: it shouldn't start recording stuff in Korean unless you've watched at least two or three shows in Korean.
Re:Stupid Profiling (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stupid Profiling (Score:3, Informative)
And, frankly, anything and everything will offend someone, somewhere. If you don't want it, don't enable the feature.
You're not getting my point, Zathrus. I'm talking from a marketing standpoint here, not a personal one. I know perfectly well how to exclude stuff from Amazon (don't have a TiVO), though I haven't been able to figure out how to exclude a whole category that mistakenly includes a handful of books I am interested in - but that's another story.
There are certain topics which any marketing type will tell you are hot-button issues: political party, religious affiliation, sexuality, vi versus emacs. Unlike the last one, you are more likely to offend potential customers if you misidentify their political party, religious affiliation, or sexuality than you are to entice them if you identify them properly (significantly more; you'll maybe offend 3% of the population if you give them a copy of Business at the Speed of Light for Christmas, but you'll offend 60% if you give them a copy of al Quran for Christmas (those whose religious sensibilities are stronger than their curiosity, and those whose religious sensibilities cannot accept the idea of a Christmas gift in the first place)). And given the fact that there are more than two possible political viewpoints (a whole spectrum from Genghisid legalist to utopian anarchist), more than two possible religious affiliations, and more than two possible sexualities (straight/gay/bisexual + male/female), your odds of getting it wrong are greater than 50%. So a sensible marketer would stay clear of those topics.
This is what I mean by stupid profiling.
Same thing happened on my computer (Score:3, Funny)
Outwitting the profiler? (Score:3, Informative)
Your Tivo can embarass you when you show it off.. (Score:5, Funny)
More amazingly I gave each of these shows 3 thumbs down.. but every once in a while, Tivo would still record 'Golden Girls' for me.. as if it was trying to say, "Nonono, seriously, this is a good show! You must have just seen one bad episode, give it another try!"
-gerbik
Lame posting, lame pregnant gay man paragraph (Score:3, Informative)
Regarding the pregnant gay man, Amazon has a feature where you can see what the basis was for a recommendation. If you find it was based on a book or other product that you do not want them to consider for your recommendations, you click a button and that is the end of it. The writer of the article should have done more research.
Is profiling so bad? (Score:3, Insightful)
1. TiVo is not multi-user capable, at least as far as I've observed so far. So my friend watches NFL & South Park, his wife is hooked on Buffy, and they have Tivo record Teletubbies for their kid. Profile this! I'm quite frankly surprised the Tivo hasn't exploded yet.
2. Human "profiling" messes up the same way.
Last year I mentioned the leonoids to my in-laws. I promptly got a beginner's guide to stargazing for my birthday. Boring. I like looking at some shooting stars or the like, but I'm not up to reading books about it and becoming a full scaled backyard astronomer. Very nice and thoughtful gift though.
3. For the most part, profiling does work for me. There is a load of [Items on Amazon|Shows on TV|Goods at the Supermarket], way more than I can sort through manually. So if Amazon, based on my previous purchases, shows me some new R/C toy, I appreciate that. Better than randomly advertising some Barby Doll in the same space.
I've found Tivo recording some great shows for me. Some garbage, too, but I can say that it guesses correctly quite often.
Seriously, is profiling hurting us so much? I think it's quite acceptable, realizing that one of the cost saving aspects of more technically advanced infrastructure is improved advertising. Let them make a buck.
Yeah of course it's all about stereotypes. But next time you see a Tampon commercial during Monday night football, let me know.
Personalized /. comments (Score:5, Funny)
First Post!
Imagine a beowulf
Sony/M$ sux, OS rules
CmdrTaco can't spell
This is old news
Oh wait,
Sometimes, however, it works. (Score:3, Interesting)
For that occasional miracle, I'll take all the Univision soap operas, shopping channel dreck, and Korean news I can delete, and I'll thank TiVo every time for trying.
My TiVo rec's have gone bland. (Score:5, Funny)
How I responded was to thumbs-down any recorded suggestion that I didn't like. And after a while, TiVo learned. A little too well.
In fact, now, it hardly records any recommendations at all. And they are usually some bland program that is completely unnoteworthy. Frankly, I wish my TiVo had some balls.
I'd like for it to try suggestion some new programs that hit the air each season. Or something a little daring. But it is too timid and weak to come close. I'm afraid that I've broken its spirit.
At Last!! (Score:3, Funny)
Doubt anyone will believe me though
What is truly scary about this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Then again, come to think of it, I suppose the entire advertising industry operates this way- alter people's behaviour (and boost their inclination to consume) by exploiting their insecurities. The moral of the story- turn off your TV!
tivo personalities (Score:4, Funny)
To my tivo, I'm a 5 year old with a $600 a week crack habit.
Fixing TiVo Suggestions (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fixing TiVo Suggestions (Score:5, Informative)
don't anthropomorphize computers. they hate that. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't have a Tivo (or a TV, for that matter), but my Amazon profile still hasn't recovered from when my wife was in graduate school studying developmental psychology, specializing in childhood trauma. More books about child sexual abuse, just what I wanted. =:-O The programming books are staging a comeback, though.
What I find particularly interesting are the "people who ordered this also ordered these" selections. On infrequently-ordered titles, it only takes one or two wackos with bizarre profiles to generate some really peculiar results.
To set the record straight for the non-TiVo users (Score:3, Interesting)
- Suggestions are optional. There is a menu setting under "Messages and Setup ==> My Preferences. Don't care for suggestions? Turn them off. (like they are on my TiVo)
- TiVo will never delete something you have as a Season Pass in order to record a suggestion. If stuff is expiring too quickly, that's just a sign you need to put in some bigger hard disks.
(or watch less TV)
- If TiVo records something you don't like, give it one thumb down before you delete it. That's all it takes. Seriously! The only thing you should give three thumbs down to is Paid Programming.
- If your suggestions get too out of whack then you can clear all of them. Go into the "System Resets" under "Messages and Setup" and there is an option to "Reset Thumb Ratings and Suggestions".
- A good resource for all things TiVo is the Tivo Community forum at
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/ [tivocommunity.com]
You'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about TiVo there.
(they'll probably kill me now for linking to them from Slashdot.)-bwillcox-
(owner of a Philips S1 TiVo with 249 hours + turbonet and tivoweb)
Not so bad, and easier way to fix the problem (Score:5, Informative)
As the article points out, the suggestion algoritm isn't perfect, but if it gets off target, it's fairly easy to correct... even though the users in the article obviously hadn't figured out the most efficient way to do so. The suggestion system works by allowing the viewer to press the "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" button. Strangely enough you can give a show up to three thumbs up or down (most people I know only have two thumbs;). The algorithm uses these ratings to find shows that have been catagorized the same way as shows that the user has rated highly. One thing that most people don't realize is that any show selected for recording automatically gets one thumb up. Naturally, for this system to work, show catagorizations have to be accurate, which isn't always the case.
The users in the article who recorded lots of shows to counter the ratings were doing things the hard way. A much easier way is simply to go to the suggestions screen where TiVo supplies a list of recommended shows that it thinks the viewer might want to see. From there, it's easy to just give three thumbs down to each of the shows that the viewer doesn't like. On a lucky day the show that caused the problem in the first place will appear as a re-run, so the problem can be fixed quickly. This can be repeated until the suggestions screen only shows stuff that the viewer likes.
Amazon recommendations (Score:3, Informative)
Rather than go through all the trouble of engineering a profile, though, he could have found the purchased item in "Improve your recommendations" and deselected the "Use to make recommendations" box. Problem solved.
I like the system; over time it's brought authors to my attention that I might not otherwise have noticed.
oliver, toffler, brunner, emperors (Score:3, Interesting)
There's an interesting passage about olivers in John Brunner's excellent novel, "The Shockwave Rider":
"... so-called olivers, electronic alter-egos designed to save the owner the strain of worrying about all his person-to-person contacts. A sort of twenty-first-century counterpart to the ancient Roman nomenclator, who discreetly whispered data into the ear of the emperor and endowed him with the reputation of a phenomenal memory." (pp. 41-42)
More than a few of those emperors went crazy from all that power, which makes me wonder:
What happens when tens of millions of 21-century citizens have their personalities extended -- and some of them already crazy?
Well, for a start
If you think a little ahead (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't all that funny. I'd even say it's serious. While the consequences in this case are little more than a strange and perhaps unexpected selection of programming, consider the consequences if say, lyin' Johnny (Poindexter) and a huge government bureaucracy drew some equally bizarre conclusions based on what you've bought, what you've watched on TV, or how frequently you've visited a certain establishment, or where you've traveled. I hope the 'suspicious' person is still laughing as they're being carted off to a Q&A session with a couple of HomeSec droids. While coercing Tivo to modify it's behavior is but a minor annoyance, I can't help but think that we're about the see the very real danger in allowing others to acquire the means to draw completely inaccurate conclusions about who we are and what we're doing.
Poor AI AI is poor (Score:5, Interesting)
While I can't really know what kind of effort was put into these systems, it seems unlikely that Amazon or TiVo hired a team of veteran AI developpers to build these features. That being said, this problem still underlies a trend in all AI systems, no matter how good. That is that they are all really quite dumb when you compare them to anything we would call "reasonable" intelligence. They are incredibly fallible, incredibly silly machines in terms of their output to a large extent. Sure they can be made to do wonderful things, but it always has to be done with a group of human "moderators" to judge and assess the machine's performance and output, and that with a large grain of salt.
The idea that a machine is objective and not biased like people is absurd. They are more biased. They can only follow mindlessly the rules set down for them by their designers, and do not have the breadth or depth of experience that people have to know when the rules don't apply. Even the best dynamic systems and neural nets have these flaws somewhere or other. While it is funny to see them goof like this, it is scary to think that Governments are going to use similar techniques [slashdot.org] for vital things like law enforcement. This is a serious concern to all of our civil rights.
To Be Announced (Score:4, Funny)
It also decided for a while that I really wanted to watch Korean love stories and Latino dance parties, but it got over that eventually.
Nowadays I keep my TiVo full enough that it never has room for suggested recordings, except the occasional SCTV or South Park, which is as it should be.
I think my TiVo is gay... (Score:5, Funny)
I use TiVo at work and have very specific reasons to turn off profiling: I never want it to record something I didn't tell it to record. It's not that I don't think it's a perfectly good feature. I just don't ever need it.
A couple of weeks of thumbing TiVo's suggestions up and down and profiling gets pretty good. Other than that, just remember it's not really profiling you. It's just filling the empty space on your hard drive with stuff that's somehow like stuff you've said you like (or stuff you've watched, if you haven't told it anything).
But I've got a different problem. My TiVo doesn't think I'm gay. I think it's gay. I leave it on CSPAN every night because I like to watch "Washington Journal" in the morning when I come in early to work. I don't want CSPAN cluttering up my hard disk, but (since TiVo auto-records the last 30 minutes of whatever the channel is set to) I'd prefer to have it record something interesting.
Recently, though, it's been watching The Discovery Channel when I get in to work. It hasn't recorded anything on Discovery; I don't have anything programmed to be recorded on Discovery; I don't even think I've ever watched a Discovery Channel show on it. But there it is: happily watching "Interior Motives" on The Discovery Channel. The only explanation I can come up with: It's got a crush on the host.
Re:I think my TiVo is gay... (Score:3, Informative)
It's connecting to the Discovery Channel because there is a specific block of time that Tivo buys to send some of the previews and promo clips down to the unit. Instead of trying to dump all of that information over the modem, they buy a half hour block of paid advertising time and send it to the Tivo in encoded format. If your Tivo isn't doing anything else during that time, it will tune itself to Discovery Channel and download all that information.
If you were watching during that time period, you would also see all of the promotional clips, commercials, etc that your Tivo has on its main menu. Unfortunately, if you don't record anything else, your TV will be on Discovery once the show is finished. Sort of confusing, but I think it's documented on one of Tivo's FAQs.
TiVo Suggestions are collaborative (Score:3, Informative)
To shed a little more light on this, TiVo's suggestions are collaborative; that is, other users' choices figure in to what it records as suggestions for you. That can help explain some of the "inappropriateness" that happens sometimes.
Here's a link to a thread on the TiVo Community Forums that further explains how TiVo's suggestions engine works: TiVo Community Forum [tivocommunity.com]
Sorry, but "counter-programming" doesn't work (Score:3, Interesting)
These systems (generically, recommendation systems or collaborative filtering) don't use pre-defined genres or categories. They use correlations between actions to predict future actions. So your recommendations are essentially based on the sum of your past actions. In other words, you can't make it ignore "gay" stuff by selecting "macho" stuff-- it will just sum those together and you'll get both "gay" and "macho" stuff.
Worse, if enough people try to outsmart the system, it pollutes the correlations. "Gay" and "macho" items become linked together, and requesting one makes it recommend the other. This can work both ways. If most of the people who record "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" are doing so to counter their watching "Queer as Folk", then someone who watches "Third Reich" will get "Queer" as their first recommendation!
In case it's not clear how this works, let me describe one generic type of recommendation system. The system forms rules like "People who like A also like B, C, and D" based on analyzing its database, with some definition of "like." This being e-commerce, it's usually "like=buy". It might be more complicated, e.g. "35% of people who buy A also buy B."
These rules can be shown raw, as Amazon does, or they can be personalized. I've bought A, C, and D, so it combines the rules for A, C and D (using set intersections, sums, averages, etc. depending on how the rules are stored.) It decides, in essence "People who like A like B; people who like C like B; you like A and C, so you probably would like B."
So if you wanted to counter your watching "Queer as Folk", what you would want to do is not train it with "anti-gay" input, rather you would want to flood it with "everything but gay" input-- BUT you would probably have to do it IN EQUAL PROPORTION to the viewing habits of the average person in their database.
Thumbs Up/Down Buttons (Score:3, Informative)
Its just a computer. Think about it. If it randomly records Will & Grace, and you play the recording and then say "OMG GAY" and delete it, Tivo can't hear you and probably assumes you watched it. Press thumbs down three times and I guarantee you won't get Will & Grace again.
Re:Thumbs Up/Down Buttons (Score:5, Informative)
It is not a good idea to give three thumbs-down on a lot of shows, this will tend to deterioriate the suggestions algorithm. One thumb is usually sufficient, but keep in mind that TiVo doesn't know, for an individual show rating, WHY you thumbed it, so it adds or subtracts weighting from entries for genre, actors, directors, etc.
As an example - my wife has season passes for various home improvement shows, such as Changing Rooms. So we get lots of suggestions for other home and garden shows, including various Martha Stewart shows. My wife hates Martha, so we give her shows one thumb down, but the TiVo doesn't know it's because of Martha. It's the collective weight of other ratings that tune the suggestions.
For a while, there was a hidden feature called TeachTiVo, that allowed you to rate individual actors, directors, titles and genres. The UI wasn't complete (and was buggy), and you had to "enable backdoors" to get at it at all. The whole feature was removed in recent versions, unfortunately. I'd like to see something like it return in the future.
Re:Link requires subscription! (Score:3, Informative)
Mod the parent down -- here's the real text. (Score:5, Informative)
If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here's How to Set It Straight
What You Buy Affects Recommendations
On Amazon.com, Too; Why the Cartoons?
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man."
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
Re:Article text, here ya go. (Score:5, Funny)
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Wow, if this woman isn't a complete example of "stupid whore," I don't know what is. She's fine watching someone f*ck an apple pie, but Tom Green licking a mouse -- now THAT shit has got to stop!
Anyone else think it's kind of odd where she draws the line?
Re:grr (Score:5, Informative)
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man." [TiVo Remote] Remote Control: Viewers help TiVo understand their tastes by giving TV shows thumbs up or down.
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at
jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com
Re:grr (Score:5, Funny)
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. [...] "I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
Want to bet about what she has in her nighttable?
Re:grr (Score:3, Insightful)
My TiVo is my only friend!
Re:Is this a violation of the DMCA? (Score:5, Informative)
That being said, thanks for posting it
Re:Is this a violation of the DMCA? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is this a violation of the DMCA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair use considers how much of the text is used, and using the whole thing all at once is almost certainly to be found a violation by the judge.
Additionally, fair use considers "monetary damages" caused by the use. Since the Post has a subscription system and not just the standard advertisements, "monetary damages" could be very significant; people who might have subscribed instead just read it here.
IANAL either but most people extremely seriously overestimate the power of fair use. Posting the article was a copyright violation, to a high enough degree of certainty I don't feel the need to qualify that with any variation of "probably".
Remember... the law is not what you think it is, it is what the the law says and how a judge interprets it. The Slashdot community as a whole is very incorrect in its interpretation of "fair use".
Re:grr (Score:3, Funny)
Blockbuster material. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm thinking of something along the lines of The Manchurian Canidate meets The Net meets Raw Deal. Karen Mistal could be the vapid love intrest who puts him in a family way. John Ashton the unscrupulous villain. George Clooney the dashing rival. And a cameo by Gary Condit.
Well it certainly couldn't be worse than extreme ops, or half past dead.
Or, even better... (Score:4, Interesting)
...give a checkbox in the user preferences, "I {do,do not} have an interest in stories from subscription-only sites."
Re:grr (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Tivo categories (Score:3, Informative)
But I never want it to record the 700 Club,
Find the 700 Club in the listings and give it 3 thumbs-down, or if TiVo is suggesting it, give the suggestion 3 thumbs-down before deleting it.
Alternatively, drop the entire channel it airs on from the list of channels you receive. The whole channel's run by Pat Robertson anyway.
Re:Someone help me out here... (Score:3, Informative)
That's not quite how it works, and you can turn it off anyway.
Suggestions are only recorded if there is space not currently used by things you asked for. They will never overwrite something you explicitly recorded; only free space or other suggestions.
There is also a switch to turn suggestion recording off.
(Leaving it on is actually useful, because there's no other way to tell how much space you have available; that way, when your suggestion list starts to shrink, you know you're running out of space and it soon will be deleting stuff you asked for.
Re:Someone help me out here... (Score:3, Informative)
The people who get the most freaked about TiVo suggestions seem to be those who haven't used a TiVo and have all sorts of misconceptions about the way it works. I turned off auto-record of suggestions, but I still peruse the suggestions list from time to time and occasionally I've spotted things I would like to see that I didn't know were on. I've found new favorite series this way as well.
Re:Someone help me out here... (Score:3)
You can get aftermarket drive upgrades that can boost that up to 300G/hours.
Replacing the drives won't effect your service. You'll just have to reprogram your TiVo afterwards.
Re:I'm Amazed (Score:3, Insightful)
There aren't hundreds of posts bashing TiVo for profiling. Oh wait, that's because people can't even pretend to read the article because it requires a SUBSCRIPTION! heh.
Thing is, we're dealing with two separate issues here.. The "profiling" Tivo does is periodically it phones in stats on everything you recorded and/or watched, which Tivo (the company) compiles and sells as anonymous viewer data to the networks (i.e. 5,000 of our subscribers recorded Dawson's creek this week, of those 4,000 watched it within 48 hours, and 1,000 deleted it after watching the first 10 minutes").
The second issue is Tivo's suggestions.. *As far as I know* (and I could totally be wrong here), your Tivo computes suggestions on the box itself, not by consulting with some master Tivo database somewhere. It's really quite braindead... All shows are assigned categories, so Tivo computes a "probability" of whether you may or may not like a given category based on your thumb-data. For example, if you thumb up the Simpsons (category Animation, Comedy), you're likely to see stuff like Futurama, and lots of stuff on the cartoon network which fit those categories. Some lines are a little blurry, I thumbed-up Politically Incorrect (when it was on the air) which was categorized as News, Talk, and got crap like the O'Reilley factor, CNN's crossfire, etc. Some things are a lot easier, I thumbed up a couple of motorcycle races, and from then on it would catch motorcycle races I didn't even realize were being broadcast.
Contrary to the anecdotal evidence in the article, in my experience approving one category will NOT lower your "approval" of another. I think only thumbs-down will do that (i.e. thumbing up Emeril Live - Howto, Cooking - shouldn't dimish its afinity for Movies, Horror if you have thumbed up Texas Chainsaw Massacre).
My theory I have after owning a couple of Tivos is at first when you haven't rated much it tries to throw a wide variety of EVERYTHING at you to get you to rate stuff and get it pointed in the right direction. During the first three months I got some strange suggestions (my Tivo thought I was a kid for a while, and recorded just about everything on HBO Family, presumably because of my favorable ratings for simpsons, futurama, king of the hill, and family guy. But I have to say after three months it got REALLY good and finding stuff I'd want to see.
There has been talk that in future releases some of the suggestion tweaking will be done on the in-house Tivo servers and pushed out to the boxes (i.e. people who record MST3K on commedy central also record Monty Python on BBCA most of the time). But to my knowledge right now all of your suggestions happen in the Tivo box itself based on input from you, and are not neccessarily shared back to Tivo corporate or influenced from the suggestions of other subscribers.
Shayne