Tech companies know everything about me ā so why do they try to sell me so much rubbish? | Joel Snape
No, Amazon, I do not want to buy another version of the thing I just bought, or any other random object I donāt recognise or
No, Amazon, I do not want to buy another version of the thing I just bought, or any other random object I donāt recognise or understand We live, as Iām sure someoneās chief growth officer has recently boasted on an earnings call, in a golden age for data capture. Jeff Bezos knows what I buy, read and watch; Mark Zuckerberg will be aware that I recently sold a car transport box for a medium-sized dog.
Iāve been ruthlessly conditioned into clicking Accept All Cookies every time I want to check how much cumin my favourite chilli needs, and I simply accept that my washing machine is probably spying on me. All of which raises the obvious question: with all of these terabytes of personal information available, why canāt try to sell me something I might actually like? Every time I swipe open my Kindle, for instance, I dismiss an advert for a bestselling trilogy called something like Ruthless Faerie Werewolves or Evil Mafia Hunk, even though I have never once ā in my life ā read a book where the main character could be described as a āmorally grey shadow daddyā.
I stopped watching Stranger Things after one season, and yet Netflix, which should know this better than anyone, has suggested the stage-play version to me so many times that I can recite its ad from memory. Amazon seems to have given up on predicting my needs and advertises the same one-off purchases that Iāve just bought, while Reddit and X want me to buy software products that I genuinely donāt understand.
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