This Wall Street Journal article (subscribers only) is one of the funniest things I’ve read recently, about how consumer-behavior tracking software in products like TiVo can freak people out (“My TiVo thinks I’m Gay!”). One of the best parts is when Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com goes to demonstrate the “preference tracking” features on his company’s site in front of a live audience, and he logs on, and it tells him the top recommendation for Jeff Bezos is a DVD called “Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity.”
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.’ “