Tech recommendations can reveal more about us than we know ourselves - but how and why does this happen?
After BBC reporter Ellie House came out as gay, she realised that Netflix already seemed to know. How did that happen?
However, at that time I was watching a lot of Netflix and I was getting more and more recommendations for series with lesbian storylines, or bi characters. It wasn't just Netflix. Soon, I had spotted similar recommendations on several platforms. Spotify suggested a playlist it described as "sapphic" - a word to describe women who love women.A few months later, I came to the separate realisation that I myself was bisexual.Netflix has 222 million users globally and thousands of films and series available to stream across endless genres.
Instagram had a list of more than 300 different topics it thought I was interested in, which it used for personalised advertising. Other platforms have similar policies. Netflix told me that what a user has watched and how they've interacted with the app is a better indication of their tastes than demographic data, such as age or gender."No one is explicitly telling Netflix that they're gay," says Greg Serapio-Garcia, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge specialising in computational social psychology. But the platform can look at users that have liked "queer content".
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