When filtering algorithms attack!
Premium Blend: A group weblog from the editors of Corante: The Wall Street Journal on how TiVo and other personalizing technologies can get it wrong: "[Basil] Iwanyk, 32 years old, 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.'" Posted by DeLong at November 28, 2002 01:01 PM | Trackback
This has such a funny resonance with the type of programs the Total Information Awareness people were looking for. Can you imagine this software turned loose to track down terrorists and instead turning up contract bridge players or garbage disposal sales reps. Here's the link to the fed's pipe-dreaming wish list.
http://www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm
an excerpt:
Technically, the TIA program is focusing on the development of: 1) architectures for a large-scale counter-terrorism database, for system elements associated with database population, and for integrating algorithms and mixed-initiative analytical tools; 2) novel methods for populating the database from existing sources, create innovative new sources, and invent new algorithms for mining, combining, and refining information for subsequent inclusion into the database; and, 3) revolutionary new models, algorithms, methods, tools, and techniques for analyzing and correlating information in the database to derive actionable intelligence.
"[Basil] Iwanyk, 32 years old, suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay...."
Didn't they forget to say, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."?
Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan on November 29, 2002 06:50 AM"Self-described straightest guy on Earth"?
Yeh, yeh, tell me another one, Mary. I'm with the TiVo on this one.
Posted by: dsquared on November 29, 2002 07:28 AMwasn't this on an episode of HBO's "the mind of the married man" recently?
Posted by: kenny on November 29, 2002 08:42 AMIt's not just high tech appliances. My washing machine thinks I'm gay. It keeps turning my white underwear pink.
Posted by: Arthur on November 30, 2002 03:00 PM