Hacker News Reader

Comment by gbear0 | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a much more useful usecase to me than burglars, but apparently you can't manually control the device beyond automated paths, which makes this almost useless I think.

But even if you could manually control the device, I'd be too afraid of having Amazon capturing full video of all my belongings. They have the resources to easily hook up the feed to an object detection ETL or some other AI system to extract a ton of information about the owners, and then sell that as specialized advertising intelligence. All of a sudden my mailbox fills up with lots of high focused ads.

OK I realize that's probably going down the conspiracy theory path a little much :), but I don't think it's too far off.

View on HN

Honestly I would be shocked if that's not the goal. Imagine being able to not only know someone has your product, but not advertise to them until that product disappears, is in a state of disrepair, or reaches a particular age.

It wouldn't surprise me if this was a goal but they should really figure out basic recommendations first.

I just bought a power washer. I bought it on Amazon. Amazon easily knows I now own a power washer. And yet Amazon is giving me a ton of recommendations for power washers.

This is a constant problem with recommendations and everyone I know has the same experience.

And unless there's some sort of data regulation preventing them from applying my purchase history to their recommendations it's ridiculously easy to fix. Tag item categories as "1 per household over x months" and when someone purchase amount goes beyond the threshold stop recommending products from that category until x months has passed.

Do you seriously think that Amazon never thought of not showing you a second power washer? The data must show that this is more profitable than the alternatives.

I have Google advertising to me, on my Pixel 3a using Google Fi, in my Gmail app, telling me about how I should sign up for Google Fi.

I have a pretty good hunch that these companies often do stupid stuff like this.

And Verizon is constantly mailing me to switch to FIOS. And when I look on their site to look up FIOS availability, it's not actually available.

For some reason, both Comcast and Verizon also have my address as a variant on my real postal service address that hasn't been true since before I moved here over 20 years ago.

Same with vacuum cleaners. How many does Amazon really think I need in my 1 bedroom, hardwood floor apartment.

Just one more, man.

It seems to be a general problem with recommendation engines.

I assume that manually tagging certain types of items with a flag that means "The buyer is unlikely to buy another item in this category within a meaningful timeframe no matter how often we recommend it" is more effort than the recommendation slot is worth. There are probably a number of flags one could imagine setting but it's likely very hard to automate because it requires understanding how people use/consume/upgrade/etc. a given item.

Of course that's what they'll use it for. Don't worry -- the terms and conditions that nobody reads or could understand even if they did read, says they just send "metadata" back to improve the user experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com