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Comment by UglyToad | Hacker News Reader

It amazes me that these mega wealthy corporations don't understand uh... going abroad.

Like I know it's not so common on the US but here if you pop across to France for a week you get ads for everything in French. Despite my best* efforts I still speak abysmal French. You're not going to sell me shit in French (or indeed anything anyway).

I literally just crossed a border, I didn't become French, please.

This despite me being pretty lazy and generally letting my data get slurped left, right and center.

Perfect market efficiency strikes again...

*Citation needed

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I've noticed Google's web properties are particularly bad about this. I'm logged into an account - they know what language I want my search results in because I told them in my account preferences, but if my IP geolocation says I'm in a different country, I must want the UI in the local language, right?

This used to be especially bad in Google Maps. Just because I'm in Japan doesn't mean that I, the US-ian logged into their English-language Google account, can suddenly read Japanese!

If the Gmail UI is in Japanese I can probably muddle through. If train lines and street names are in kanji I'm probably effed.

(Maps has since improved language detection.)

I hate this with search too. It doesn’t seem to understand that some speak many languages. Searching for podcasts in Apple Podcasts will only yield me in my native language and not English ones (or any other language for that matter)

On the other side, I love every time I see a Spanish ad (I know only elementary school and restaurant menu-level Spanish) because it means I'm seeing fewer badly targeted English ads just because I do sometimes love watching Spanish language content with English subtitles. Spanish ads seem frequently less toxic to me. It's a bit of useful misinformation I'm happy to feed the ad targeting algorithms because I want them to have garbage about me. They are garbage-in/garbage-out in general anyway, but the more garbage I intentionally feed them, the happier I feel, because I'm still somewhat in control.

I don't use an ad blocker, I'm okay with generic, untargeted ads. I do block a lot of advertising cookies and I am isolating them from each other in a cat and mouse game. Intentional misinformation is a fun part of that, too.

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