Saturday, January 04, 2014

Listen to Pandora, and It Listens Back - NYTimes.com

Mining and user profiling for "magical insights" that have been applied in targeting domains such as political campaign advertising
"“The advantage of using our own in-house data is that we have it down to the individual level, to the specific person who is using Pandora,” Mr. Bieschke says. “We take all of these signals and look at correlations that lead us to come up with magical insights about somebody.”
People’s music, movie or book choices may reveal much more than commercial likes and dislikes. Certain product or cultural preferences can give glimpses into consumers’ political beliefs, religious faith, sexual orientation or other intimate issues. That means many organizations now are not merely collecting details about where we go and what we buy, but are also making inferences about who we are."
The article ends on a cautiously optimistic note:
“I’m optimistic that the benefits to society will outweigh the risks,” Professor Shmatikov says. “But our attitudes will have to evolve to understand that now everybody knows more about who we are.”
Listen to Pandora, and It Listens Back - NYTimes.com

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