After reading Alexis C. Madrigal’s article “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood”, I began to think about how well the Internet knows us. Madrigal, in her article, describes how she uncovered Netflix’s 76,897 unique movie genres, which, initially, does not appear to have much significance besides a good laugh over the ridiculous genre titles. However, this discovery provides insight into how Netflix uses their “hybrid human and machine intelligence approach” to provide movie suggestions to users based on the tags attached to each movie in his or her viewing history. Madrigal explains, “the underlying tagging data isn’t just used to create genres, but also to increase the level of personalization in all the movies a user is shown. So, if Netflix knows you love Action Adventure movies with high romantic ratings (on their 1-5 scale), it might show you that kind of movie, without ever saying, “Romantic Action Adventure Movies.” I know that I, along with every other Netflix binger, have fallen victim to their recommendation feature—It is simply too hard to pass up.
Soon after reading Madrigal’s article, I began to realize that a majority of the websites and apps that I use on a daily basis attempt to manipulate their users in similar ways. Facebook, Instagram, and iTunes all employ specific methods to recommend certain products to their users. On Instagram, there are two different methods. First, after following a high profile page, immediately a tab drops down recommending three other possible pages that you might be interested in. The other method is on the explorer page, where they display pictures based on who your friends follow, or pictures you’ve previously viewed or liked. iTunes recommends music in similar ways; at the bottom of every page there are “Listeners Also Bought” and “Genius Recommendation” sections, which suggest music based on your purchase history.
Facebook, comparably, recommends pages to follow but it also utilizes cookies as well. Cookies are “a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user’s web browser while the user is browsing that website. Every time the user loads the website, the browser sends the cookie back to the server to notify the website of the user’s previous activity (Wikipedia). The usage of cookies is easily noticeable by the advertisements displayed on your Facebook Newsfeed. I’ve always noticed that after I browse certain websites, my feed suddenly fills up with advertisements from that particular website and those similar to it. It is crazy to think just how well the Internet knows you.
Works Cited:
- Alexis C. Madrigal, “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood,” The Atlantic, January 2, 2014
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie