Hacker News Reader

Comment by dude_abides | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, just yesterday, I found out that Linkedin Friend Suggest uses, among other things, co-logins from same IP address as a signal. On my test account that I created at work, it eerily showed me all my co-workers in the Friend Suggest list. Later, as soon as I logged in from home, it added my wife to my Friend Suggest list.

I wonder if one of the goals of a good Data Scientist is also to be not too accurate, lest the product create an eerie feeling among users! (remember the Target pregnant girl incident?!)

View on HN

I think avoiding creepiness requires using intuition from human interaction.

In particular, it's creepy if someone knows something about you and you don't know why.

So if you don't want data mining to be creepy, you have two options:

a) Explain why you know something.

b) Wait until data mining is so commonplace that people take it for granted, and standards of etiquette shift.

I think that there is a tension between "creepiness" and "effective marketing". This I feel is one of Facebook's core problems, where for them to maximize the value of their dataset, their ad targeting becomes incredibly creepy.

One issue is that from an end users perspective it makes it obvious how much information is being captured about them. While most people are aware that their information is being captured, seeing it plastered all over their facebook feed makes them confront it.

Worse than that are the questions that come with these ads - "Why am I seeing ads for baldness cures?" Is it because I'm a 30+ male, or is it because they have analysed photos I'm tagged in and detected my thinning hair? Sometimes it just feels mean!

This is primarily a challenge of data science working in a marketing environment and doesn't really permeate through all areas of data science, however it is the form of data science that is most visible. Therefore much of data science and the big data we work with gets lumped in with sleazy marketing.

Great point! Rather, it is to gather and analyse data as accurately as possible, and then apply it as inaccurately as required :)

Definitely creepy, when travelling. I've seen it, too.

An uncanny valley for data. Really interesting and certainly something I have felt but never could put a finger on.

I was pretty weirded out when the fake account I made specifically to use Spotify (and which has absolutely no information about me in the profile), got a friend request from someone from my grad program.

I'm pretty sure Twitter does this too. I've signed up for accounts in other browsers and then had my other accounts suggested to me as people I should follow.

What is the Target pregnant girl incident?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

Goals should be to avoid privacy violations by leaking private user data like IP to other users. LinkedIn has no respect for users, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com