[white-flame]

For one, it pigeonholes your internet experience. Systems like this basically take the simplest, stereotyped, one-note view of you from a snapshot of your online activity, and constantly projects that judgment back at you.

Buy a microwave oven on Amazon, for example, and now you're seeing microwaves everywhere. If you browse Youtube with cookies enabled, it's a terribly limited experience compared to with cookies blocked. The recommendations are circular within the topics you've browsed and never expose you to the broad content out there. It's a much better experience when recommendations are simply associated with the video you're currently watching, instead of from your viewing history. The data selling effect causes this sort of thing to percolate among your entire web experience.

Another is simply monetization of the self without being part of that direct monetization stream. To some people, if actual money is made off them, it seems unfair they don't get a cut. Receiving services doesn't suffice in those people's minds.

Many people are fine with sites selling ad space & what's being viewed, but are not fine with their personal information being attached to it, for basic privacy concerns.

So, of course, there's the Big Brother aspect which is socially unhealthy, and has chilling effects on freedom of expression. Obviously, there is strong, negatively associated generational memory still in play from places like North Korea and Nazi Germany, where people are/were constantly spied on for "incorrect" beliefs and statements. Certainly the personal data collection & warehousing portion of this industry can evoke similar fears here. People have already experienced negative effects like ending up on no-fly lists for zero understandable reason, presumably because of government snooping with false positives or incorrect association with similarly-named people.

Imagine if every time you went to a store, a federal agent followed you around with a clipboard with 2 columns labeled "Terrorist?" and "Child predator?". For every item you looked at, the agent would make marks evaluating how much that reflects one of the two columns. You're an upstanding citizen with zero affiliation to those categories, yet marks are being made. That's what online surveillance (for whatever reason, including PII-linked advertising) feels like to many. Even if the columns are "only" political affiliation or touchy social issues, the same response can be had.

[manigandham]

> It's a much better experience when recommendations are simply associated with the video you're currently watching

This is very subjective. You cannot speak for everyone, and meanwhile Youtube generates petabytes of analytics every day showing what people really like, down to each individual.

[white-flame]

My specific, stated metric was pigeonholing.

You receive less information online when these systems are employed, ie more repetition in the same space. Youtube optimizes for maximizing the viewing time across the most common types of viewing associations, namely people watching for entertainment, not looking for information. If you ever look for information in a new topic, you tend to be signposted back towards your old time-sink staples from your history instead.

Certainly, one can also point to algorithmic enforcement of echo chambers, which would be a subjective value judgment as well. It feels good in immediate practice (and can increase viewing time), but many don't view it as a net positive at scale for social issues. Yet for things like small-scale hobbies, it can be beneficial.

[intended]

This is basically the obesity/fast food scenario, but just for ideas. YouTube Facebook etc being the new McDonalds.

[Haegin]

Out of interest, do you have a source for that "petabytes of analytics every day"? It sounds like the kind of thing that would come out of an interesting "How we cope at scale" kind of article.

[_csoz]

> it pigeonholes your internet experience.

it seems like your issue is more with the inefficiency of the various algorithms rather than the use of data per se. And you re right, e.g. right now my supposedly AI youtube is full of the same type of videos.

> seems unfair they don't get a cut

This may ring true on the surface, but people always make money out of other people, by definition. Compensation would not work, it would be like buying a pair of shoes and then expecting to get a partial refund. One issue however is that users in this case do not have a mechanism to affect the price personalized ads so in total it seems unfair.

> and Nazi Germany,

I think you mean cold war germany. in any case it is interesting how the latest EU law completely ignores that aspect of privacy.

> a federal agent followed you a

Good point, being tracked does feel like you re being followed by an annoying salesperson. This IMHO is more annoying than the gathering of private data takes place on the internet. Privacy is not the default mode of life, in fact there are few places where one goes to when he wants to be private. Most of life involves interaction with other people and nonprivacy. One could even claim that this kind of privacy is not violated with things like ad tracking, as it happens behind screens, in safety and with relative control from the user. Of course there need to be limits to when and where this information can be gathered.

[snackman]

> it would be like buying a pair of shoes and then expecting to get a partial refund

I'd think of it more like treating any consumer of a product as an investor at the same time