Where is the line I wonder?
If Netflix effectively says “you seem to like watching gay stuff, here’s more gay content”, is that wrong? Because it seems like that’s not Netflix targeting a user’s sexuality, just their viewing preferences.
OTOH it’s pretty harrowing to hear about people in (for instance) Uganda who are outed by an algorithm and (whether it is correct or not) find themselves ostracised or worse.
There was a period when, for some reason, it would recommend playlists related to getting "tarted up", "makeup on", being a "powerful woman" etc and recommending lots of music it thinks is for women.
Though I do listen to a wide variety of music, there's nothing notable I'd say could encourage it to believe that.
Generally I play metal and rock, grime, rap, hip-hop; but also classical, some pop and indie, occasionally "UK Top 50", "Coding Mode" and "Jazz Vibes" playlists and lots of children's bath time songs.
I had to have a purge and its much better now but I still avoid the auto-playlists.
I wonder if it had something to do with my location; I was living in London and now live in the North.
Even if Netflix's intentions had been perfectly benign - and even if they didn't specifically target this category but only did so emergently through some unsupervised algorithm - they now have a way to find out for all of their customers whether they are closetted gay.
Imagine someone like Trump or Desantis or even worse coming to power. People like those will certainly find such databases helpful, and they won't care at all whether the data is ostensibly about viewing preferences or directly about sexual orientation.
I mentioned Uganda because I listened to a story earlier in the week about a man being thrown out of his mother’s home because she saw his Tik-Tok feed and it was full of very openly gay content. So we don’t necessarily have to imagine it - in some places this is already happening.