After a normal day of work I got home as usual and started to chill out at Netflix. After a few minutes, I have decided to finally watch the Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain which was at my should watch someday movie list for a very long time.
It was only a normal movie session until it got to a scene where a peculiar piece of art was shown. I never knew about it, and I have decided to Google it just out of curiosity.
It is a shame that I didn't know what this piece of art was, considering that it is Renoir's
Some character at the movie mentioned the painting's name but I didn't pay much attention. I just heard by glance that it started with lunch or something.
So, i went to Google and proceeded to type the word lunch. By the time I typed the letters lun, the first suggestion popped out. It was the painting's name, Luncheon of the Boating Party.
And it just blew my mind. I never searched for that in Google. In fact, i didn't know that painting even exist. Google has become such an essential thing in our lives that sometimes we even forget how efficient and creepy it is.
How could Google know about it? Lun, as I typed, should bring results such as "Lunch near me", or "Lunch for monday" or something like that, not Exactly what i was thinking about with no more information that the simple L-U-N letters that I gave it.
Top comments (2)
Yes I have experienced it many times.
I don't know weather I should be glad that we've come far or I should worry that I don't have privacy even in my mind!
There is probably a profile of you based on past searches. Based on this profile and other profiles like it, the model assigned a higher probability of you searching for the name of an art piece than "lunch near me" given starting input "lun".
Fun thing you can try: if you use youtube without logging in, delete your cookies. Your recommendations will change and be more generic. Same basic idea. Not sure how much is tied to cookie identifiers if you do log in.
Profiling and tracking have become a lot better thanks to deep learning. And yes this could theoretically be used for mind control, but we're not quite there yet. Nevertheless, I block tracking as much as I can, because this stuff could become very dangerous very quickly.