Does ANYBODY EVER provide an accurate response to a question like that (except when there's reason to believe they can detect it and do something to your detriment if you lie)?
If so, why?
Anybody who asks deserves to be chaffed into oblivion with garbage data.
Especially, who would be dumb enough to admit to being under 18, or, worse, under 13? An 8 year old should see the obvious reasons not to do that. A bright 6 year old.
I used to lie and say I was really old, but now I'm really old so I just lie at random.
I remember playing Leisure Suit Larry at 8 or 9 years old. They'd test you to make sure you were over 18 but if you said you were over 99, it would just reply "No you're not" and boot you. I don't remember what they'd do if you said you were under 18, I don't know if I was dumb enough to ever try it once.
That can't be all of them. I swear there was one with Bo Jackson as well, which I would confuse with the Bo Derek ones (didn't know who either was at the time).
Yah I used to type 1911, but its interesting just how old some sites allow you to be. Some places can't even deal with 100 year olds (which isn't that uncommon) while others allow you to be 150+.
Presumably some places appear to just be doing todays date-120/130 years. So its possible to create an account that likely won't be able to revalidate ones birthday using their age validators in a few years unless they adjust the age because you will be over what they think is the max age.
My "birthday" is January 1, 1970 (an homage to unix) for any database/system inappropriately asking. This way they don't have my data to leak or abuse, but I still know what I specified if I'm asked to verify it.
I don't expect there's any reason for them to divide by a datetime...but one can hope that some ad server somewhere has crashed as a result.
My go-to birthday has always been January 1st of the year I was actually born. That way it doesn't raise any eyebrows if I want to convert something to a real account or interact with real people, but it fails verification if they mishandle my credentials.
That's worked great, except that one time when I inadvertently booked a flight on united.com (who should have my actual birthday, with whom I'd flown internationally several times before) with a session token or something set by a random travel search engine to whom I had given my fake January 1st birthday and then (I thought) abandoned before picking a different flight. Customs had pointed questions about the authenticity of my passport and driver's license, because their system showed that my documents should be different and they couldn't tell me why... They eventually let me back into the country, but that was not fun.
Even better, if it ever ends up mattering -- say, at a border crossing -- you have plausible deniability. "Oh, that's the first Unix epoch timestamp, must be a bug in the system."
Not sure how much it would help at a border crossing... but with any kind of tech support it would immediately elicit a chuckle.
Yeah, but the problem is that it often locks you out of the site completely, which they don't tell you until you've answered. And when it doesn't, it often breaks features or locks down your access to content.
I guess in theory it could also trigger them to ask for a note from your parents...
> but the problem is that it often locks you out of the site completely, which they don't tell you until you've answered.
I see now. Children under 13 are not currently permitted to register on the sites and apps for Disney Parks. For activities on apps and other online offerings, minor children under 13 years old may access some content under the supervision of a parent or guardian within that person's account.
I gave Google an off-by-one birth date way back when. A few years ago they figured it out -- sorry, don't recall what hints they may have been working from -- and demanded a correction. After considering the implicit threat, account termination, I surrendered the actual birthdate.
I know somebody who lost an instagram account like this. Provided fake info when signing up. Years later, get a request to post an id or get banned. Id didn't match the fake info of course, so account banned all the same.
it really is an amazing show. I hope it does very well. However I can forsee two groups; the first, who won't watch because "it's star wars and i'm not into star wars"; the second, "i like star wars but this show doesn't have any light sabers or jedis or the force - why would i watch it?? boring!"
Or, someone could be so burnt out on the dozens of new Star Wars offerings (representing hundreds of hours of wildly-varying quality video) that they've given up on it.
I'm not into SW and less into Marvel (I'm repulsed by ubiquitousness).
That said, I found Mandalorian, Boba Fett and Andor all enjoyable; I'm guessing because they stand pretty much alone.
Likewise, I dig Pennyworth and Legion. I was well into watching both before I realized they were Marvelesque. Less Marvel seems to be my favorite Marvel.
The Star Wars shows are very bland and generic plots with Star Wars layered on top (at least the ones I’ve watched). They aren’t very good as shows if you aren’t instantly wowed just by the fact that they are in the SW universe.
It's like the existence of 40+ year old Harry Potter fans; the ones who were already adults when the books were first published. Hard to explain unless you acknowledge that many people are simple.
(At least with Star Wars, nostalgia for something they got into during childhood is a plausible explanation for anybody under 60 or so. But even so, I'm surprised more people don't grow out of it.)
> It's like the existence of 40+ year old Harry Potter fans...Hard to explain unless you acknowledge that many people are simple.
That's a weird take. I read the books as an adult and they were genuinely entertaining. What's hard to explain about that? It's not as if books marketed to children are the only things I read, but I've read a lot of children's books as an adult that were delightful.
Why judge people as being simple? I hope you aren't afraid to try something that isn't marketed to your demographic out of fear that people will think the same of you. Most people aren't so weirdly judgey, and people afraid to step outside of the boundaries drawn for them by marketers are probably missing out on creative works they'd really enjoy.
I recently did a month of Disney+ when they sent me promo for first month for $2.99.
During that month I watched the Pixar movies Soul, Luca, and Turning Red (and rewatched Onward). I also watched the Disney movies Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto. And Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs. Oh, and also the latest Dr. Strange and Thor Marvel movies, plus the Loki series.
Are you seriously claiming that all that was garbage?
Isle of Dogs is great! Disney+ is hardly the only place you can watch it though, and a lot of the other original Disney programming feels like Marvel-driven padding. The latest Pixar stuff is pretty mediocre relative to what they were making a decade ago, and Disney's modern films are... sketchy.
If you get a kick out of it, then more power to ya. Disney even gives you a place to put your money where your mouth is. For my money though, there's a lot more entertainment value to be found elsewhere.
> The latest Pixar stuff is pretty mediocre relative to what they were making a decade ago
What they were making a decade ago was Cars 2 and Brave.
Brave was pretty good, but I'm having a hard time seeing it as better than Soul, Luca, or Turning Red. And I'm having an even harder time seeing that for Cars 2.
Haven't seen Turning Red yet, but I enjoyed Brave more than Soul or Luca by a country mile. Different strokes for different folks, I guess, but Pixar's best work feels well behind them now.
NGL, until the last sentence I thought you were going in a completely different direction with this comment. I haven't seen Isle of Dogs, but the rest of that sounds like garbage / kids' stuff.
The Owl House is one of the best modern western animated series available right now. Of course Disney cancelled it because "it didn't fit to the Disney brand". If you're into animated series, that is one not to miss. Yeah, I am too very surprised it was on Disney+...
Good for them, I "pirate" content legally since I pay huge fees in Czechia from each storage media (last time I bought 64GB flashdrive, the copyright fees were more than cost of the flash drive), so I can legally download copy of any movie, TV show or music for my own use.
Pahe in India, Philipines, PSA on PM, MKVking and plenty of other options to download legally content even without torrenting.
Tiktok asked for my birthday and I couldn't navigate away from the page. I uninstalled and reinstalled the app to try and circumvent entering a birthday. They banned my account.
This account was active for 2+ years and they out of the blue REQUIRED a birthday like wth.
I thought the same, but everyone I've asked hasn't run into this question. I signed up with my phone number and didn't give them an email, maybe they're getting age from SSO for other users?
Age and gender are the two highest signals that targeted ads take into account. The Facebook growth team has always wanted to remove gathering age / gender from the sign-up flow (which reduces friction to sign up). But, ad targeting would take such a large hit, they could never do so.
It was a huge deal internally when "Custom" was added as a gender option in the sign-up flow, and even then, there's a nudge towards the binary to retain better ad targeting.
In addition to that, companies wants you to acknowledge that you're over 13 so they can be more loosey-goosey with data collection (thanks California!).
> It was a huge deal internally when "Custom" was added as a gender option in the sign-up flow, and even then, there's a nudge towards the binary to retain better ad targeting.
It's odd that advertisers would dislike that change for targeting -- surely the people who pick "custom" are sending a major signal that correlates with other preferences. It's a third grouping they can specifically target! If they split "male" into "HYPER-MASCULINE ALPHA MALE: CARS, GUNS, AND FOOTBALL FUCK YEAH!" and "I have a penis but I try not to let it make decisions for me", advertisers should presumably love that distinction too. Of course the reality is that their decades of research deciding what constitutes "male" and "female" has gotten them stuck in a shitty local minimum and they can no longer abandon this binary concept that they cling desperately to without admitting that they've never actually known what the fuck they're doing.
If there was a 300 dimensional vector expressing your nuanced gender identity that would be even better, but advertisers would have no idea how to target it (at least at first).
The easiest way to do this would be to train a bandit model to be a bidder, using this vector as part of the input features.
You would spend some time and money doing randomized exploration (maybe something more sophisticated with active learning, but just uniform random could work), then train a basic bidder to optimize whatever you are currently interested in.
The process of manually deciding which tags fit which ads is not long for this world.
I mean it literally. Money is a social construct. The joke here being that it's funny/ironic to claim that gender being a social construct is "meaningless" but then turn around and claim that another social construct -- money (which is what the "bottom line" is made of) -- is meaningful.
The fact that something is a social construct doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Heck, once you get past the basic "keep this biological organism alive" level, most of human life is lived within social constructs. That doesn't meant they're not real or not meaningful.
Gender is a social construct in that various 'gender typical behaviours' don't necessarily correlate with sex between cultures. That implies it is a learnt behaviour.
In a society where someone of the male sex is pressureed to be male gendered there will be a larger correlation between gender and sex. Which would mean miracle balding cures would do better targeting the male gender if they don't have the inofrmation to target the male sex.
They're not terrible signals. They're by far the highest-signal metrics that have been found for ad targeting. Legions of engineers and data scientist and project managers have been working on finding better metrics for a decade, and there hasn't been one found.
If the kids is below 13, targeting would probably not be allowed.
"The act, effective April 21, 2000, applies to the online collection of personal information by persons or entities under U.S. jurisdiction about children under 13 years of age, including children outside the U.S. if the website or service is U.S.-based.[1] It details what a website operator must include in a privacy policy, when and how to seek verifiable consent from a parent or guardian, and what responsibilities an operator has to protect children's privacy and safety online, including restrictions on the marketing of those under 13.[2]"
I have dim memories of lego positioning their stuff as gender-neutral when I was a kid. That went comprehensively out the window in the mid-90s or so, presumably when some lego marketer discovered the (dubious) joys of market segmentation.
What is or isn't gender-neutral is quite subjective. Pink lego sets about princesses and ponies may seem quite gendered, but what about a fire truck set? Lego City, Castle and Space each started out in the late 70s. Where those gendered? Perhaps not as overtly gendered as pink princess stuff, but nevertheless I bet they sold more of those sets to boys than girls.
To Lego's credit, they did seem to make a point of putting both girls and boys on their advertisements.
I didn't really mind it because when you mixed them up in a tupperware bin there was no "girl set" or "boy set", just a mess of Legos. Plus, like you said, there was a glut of gender-independent sets that were frankly pretty awesome. It doesn't matter if you're a boy, girl, or otherwise - you want to build that $399 Death Star kit if it's the last thing you do.
He-Man wasn't any more targeted at boys than Transformers was.
She-Ra was the most overtly gendered (being a "girl version" of an existing show) but it wasn't any more targeted at girls than My Little Pony was. Many cartoons in the 80s were just ads selling toys that were intended to be sold in either the blue aisle or the pink aisle.
Growing up I watched both He-man and She-Ra, in fact I thought She-Ra was the better show since it had a somewhat darker tone than He-Man did, but I didn't know any boys who owned She-Ra toys.
Jem and the Holograms was supposed to sell fashion dolls sold in the pink aisle (competing with Barbie), but the show itself was specifically written with lots of action to keep boys interested so they wouldn't change the channel and prevent their sisters from watching.
I really don't get this, having things be gender neutral was never the goal, it was to be gender inclusive. Boys, girls, and enbys are allowed to like different things and it's not evil to take off the blinders and use your gendered knowledge to help you figure out what to make. It only becomes an issue if you say boys can't like princes and princesses, playing house and girls can't like rockets and nerf guns.
My kids watched different content at 2, at 8, and at 16 years old. Anything beyond late teens maybe could be chalked up to "advertising BS" but I would push further that my older parents watch markedly different content then I do at middle age, and I watch markedly different content than when I was in my early twenties.
They could probably figure out watch preferences with good statistics, (and do), but asking for age probably gets them in the right ball park a lot faster.
Here's the problem: None of that is remotely generalizable. What you watch at, say, 40 is only going to apply to you. What you allow your children to watch at age 8 is also going to only apply to you.
Tying things from what you watch to what you might want to watch will be miles more effective than your age, because your age has nothing to do with what shows you watch.
I've known parents to show their kids "The Passion of Christ" or "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." I also know parents who watch (and love) shows like Phineas and Ferb or Spongebob.
What? I apologize, but that is absurd. Entire industries are built around the idea that people of different ages _generally_ have different tastes.
Take the "children's" television network Nickelodeon - someone realized that kids like different shows than adults, so they made an entire, 24/7 tv network dedicated to it.
Then they realized that kids go to bed at an earlier hour, so they made "Nick at Nite" for adults where they showed reruns of old tv shows. Then they realized that really young kids like different shows than older ones, so they made Nick Jr. Then they realized that ~college age people liked different shows, so they made Adult Swim. Then they realized that some older adults wanted to watch classic cartoons so they made Boomerang.
These weren't one-off "oh, one person likes different shows". These were entire age-based demographics. And this is but one example, plenty of industries - especially entertainment industries - target exactly this.
And plenty of hard science is based on the fact that human brains "mature" and adapt over time. Young kids brains are different that geriatric brains,
That is not to say any of this perfect. As these algorithms collect what a person does and doesn't like or watch, they can and should change.
And if someone wants to show their kids "age innappropriate" material to their kids, that's there choice. But don't recommend "The Human Centipede" to a three year old when they turn on the tv, and don't recommend Cocomelon to me.
I believe we look to government to solve these problems. I do not think whining online or thinking the power of my wallet is going to solve massive systemic issues like the entire advertising industry.
There are good and valid reasons to ask for age and I would argue legal is one of those types of reasons.
“Comply with age-related legal obligations
However, delivering ads is not something I would be willing to accept. Drop the lines below Disney and I might consider thinking about talking with wife about approaching trial run:
“Personalize your content and experiences
“Deliver targeted advertising to you”
<< age doesn't exact ring alarm bells for me here.
Not everyone is ok with being profiled from every possible angle.
Yeah but at least your kid isn’t going to run up to you begging to join a mesothelioma or trans-vaginal mesh class action suit because they saw it on TV. Some ads are just out of phase with them. I like this idea.
That might be a good idea in some cases. But, some platforms put limitations on your account if you're under 13, so it may not be what you want in other cases (requires a second parent account to manage the under 13 account, can't make account changes, content restrictions, inability to make purchases, etc).
People buy status symbols not for their direct benefit, but to communicate with their environment. A brand doesn't have to influence those who buy but those who don't.
Why does Disney really need this information for advertising purposes when they already know what shows somebody is watching? I realize that any age/gender can watch any show, and of course a lot of Disney's catalogue is pretty universal to age/gender, but there's going to be some kind of a signal in anybody's viewing history.
If some profile is routinely watching a show about makeup or horses or ballet dances, you have a pretty good guess about the age/gender. Likewise if some profile is watching a lot of shows about monster trucks, little league baseball, and RPG games, you likewise can make a pretty reasonable guess about who they are.
Because watching Starwars doesn’t equate to buying Ziplock bags.
Playing video games, of any kind as an adult is such a norm today that it’s not entirely accurate to say “well this person plays Mario, let’s advertise crayola”,
At the start Netflix was about getting rid of ads ridden cable TV so you now you can get competing Disney+ which is now just a cable TV with targeted ads based on your personal data. It is evolving, only backwards.
At first, cable TV had no ads because it was funded by subscriptions. Then most cable channels slowly started adding more and more ads and demanding higher and higher rates from cable operators to carry their channels. Then the local channels started demanding rates from cable operators to carry their channels that are otherwise available for free over the air. Then eventually they even started showing ads at the movie theater before the movie you paid to see.
What is happening with streaming services adding ads was entirely predictable because the financial incentives of a company that adopts a subscription model are to add ads to the subscription once they think they can get away with it. If they already have ads, the incentive is to add more and more of them until there's pushback (i.e. the NFL has been cutting down on commercial breaks because they got long enough and frequent enough to become a common source of fan complaints when ironically the 2 minute warning was originally added to the rulebook in the early 70s to guarantee TV broadcasters at least one commercial break each half that wasn't because the clock ran out on a quarter).
This is why all of the people who want a subscription based model for online services that are currently free are hopelessly naive. If they get their way, things will get better for a few years and then will eventually end up right back where they are but worse because you'll have to pay for the privilege of watching ads.
I am from Eastern Europe, so I have missed the "cable used to be subscription based without ads" time, so thank you for showing me how history rhymes and that ads in subscription based medium are inevitable.
I looked into this and it’s not true that cable existed without ads.
From a 1981 NYT article
> Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption, there has been a widespread impression - among the public, at least -that cable would be supported largely by viewers' monthly subscription fees.
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
Cable television may not have been conceived of as television without commercial interruption, but it was heavily advertised as being ad free and for a time it really was. I remember the ad creep. It started with channels adverting themselves or shows/movies that would air or replay later on their channel, then came ads for shows airing on other channels, then came the commercials for cars and dish soap.
Absolutely. In my area of the Midwest, first it was Channel 100 [0]. Then eventually they launched HBO. Shortly after that there came Cinemax and Showtime. These were all premium channels that showed only movies. (And many of them are still around.) It was a little while before they started having normal crap channels with ads, like WGN [1] and TBS [2].
Ad free cable may have been US centric and that era didn't last very long. The New York Times had an article in 1981[0] about how cable networks were excited about the potential to start running ads.
Since many services now split into two tiers with a cheaper option for no ads, maybe ads showing up in no-ads tier won't happen. There really wasn't the possibility to do that before streaming (multiple cable channels I guess could have been done). I pay for ad free YouTube, HBO, and Netflix (although often cancel for awhile when nothing on the service interests me). Ads for other shows on the service at the beginning of shows/movies that I can fast forward through is the most ads I will tolerate.
Yeah, that’s really weird because my spouse and I watched a few seasons of it ad-free on Netflix. I think they had something like 16 seasons available, all ad-free. It seems really odd that the company that produced it couldn’t make it also ad-free.
Market would be a hell of a lot healthier and better for customers if we'd prevent vertical integration of production and distribution, like we (in the US) did with movie theaters until very recently.
Just Pirate and store stuff using Jellyfin. It's an infinitely better experience, and everything just works. And you don't get advertised to, demographized, tracked, or anything. You download, copy, go!
I used to recommend Netflix back in the day, cause it just worked. Now, there's 30+ different streaming services, and many have switched to the "leak an episode once a week/month".
Just pirate. It's better, cheaper, AND not hostile to the end user!
I went from Exodus to Covenant and then eventually gave up on tweaking kodi and slowly went the path of least resistance to streaming services. But now it just feels like a repeat of cable tv with balcanized services.
What do you recommend in the high seas, and how do you manage the threat of malware?
So first, get a VPN. I go with ProtonVPN. Mullvad is also high quality VPN. You need these because the copyright wonks surveil popular torrent trackers.
Then, I stick primarily with video and audio. I stay away from software piracy because I prefer my data to be in FLOSS formats.
MAKE SURE to use Firefox, with "uBlock Origin" and "Privacy Badger" plugins before going to any of these links. Also if you're on Windows, go enable in Windows Explorer to show "file extensions" - some torrents will be malware with movie.mp4.exe and try to trick you to run malware.
--------------
Movies:
RARBG.to - One of the most organized public trackers, gets new content very quickly. Can search by IMDB tags (eg. tt0258038, appearing in IDMB URLs)
rutracker.org [.org, .net, .nl] - The best general tracker from Russia and arguably the best one overall. It's great for niche movies, especially from Russia and other east European countries.
TorrentGalaxy.to - Another highly recommended site for movies & TV. Proxy list.
ettvdl.com
Zooqle.com - Easy to use torrent site
1337x.to - Many public p2p releases/encodes are released here, including Tigole/UTR/YIFY. Cams are typically uploaded here as well.
psarips.com - Small-sized x265 (re-)encodes
[Documentaries] forums.mvgroup.org - Very good documentaries tracker. Registration required.
[Anime] Nyaa.si
[Anime] hi10anime.com
[Anime] shanaproject.com
► DDL (Direct Download)
forum.dirtywarez.com - Popular DDL forum. Has a request section.
scnlog.me - Scene releases
rlsbb.ru - Scene releases
ddlvalley.me
movieparadise.org
adit-hd.com
megaddl.co
rmz.cr
2ddl.ms
rarefilmm.com - Rare movies
psarips.com - Small-sized x265 (re-)encodes
► Private Torrent Trackers
Nebulance (NBL) - Very good alternative to BTN and easy to join. Great for finding/requesting old, unpopular, obscure shows. NBL can be joined through MAM. You are eligible the moment you become PU, which is 1 month.
Filelist - One of the largest general private trackers. Romanian tracker, but media content will typically include dual language audio (English and Romanian). The tracker might be smaller compared to IPT but the quality control is better, especially for movies and TV shows. You will be able to find high quality encodes from PTP and BTN which you might not find on IPT. Can be joined through MAM with a 5 months old account
IPTorrents - The largest general private tracker, period. Definitely worth to have as a back up. Invites are easy to come by if you make acquaintances otherwise you can join it through EMP (unofficial invites; need access to invite forum so you have to be Good Perv user class which requires 8 weeks on the tracker). Also, don't forget to log in every 3 months or you lose your account (called Inactivity rule)
Secret Cinema - If any of the following keywords interest you then this is the tracker for you - old (as early as the 1st movie ever), non-mainstream, non-English, arthouse, experimental, rare - movies and Tv shows. This tracker can be joined through MAM (6 months old account required) and RED.
PassThePopcorn (PTP) - Movies tracker. Best source for movies, period. Couple of unique features - !!!!* The amount of active fleshed out collections available to discover content to watch. It's often better than some legit sites dedicated to this stuff. !!!!* High quality encodes. Many torrents are marked Golden Popcorn (GP). They are best of the best encodes. It is like Oscars but for encodes. Currently it is not possible to join PTP unless you know someone who has an account there and can invite you. The best strategy suggested is to reach as high of a user class you can reach on RED as feasibly possible. This will increase chances when PTP starts recruiting again. In the meantime you can join SC, BHD, BLU etc and make requests there
beyond-hd.me (BHD) - Movies...
I'll happily build them a model which estimates it.
Heck, it could be even better, since your "mental" age based on your interests in movies could be more suitable for delivering ads then your actual age.
Hm. Recession is making us cutback on our streaming services, but which ones to keep and which ones to cancel? Thanks Disney for making the choice easy!
Piracy, because these days a lot of shows never make it to DVD. Disney in particular is terrible about this (probably to push Disney+ subscriptions). Star vs. the Forces of Evil came out in 2015 and hasn't seen a DVD release. Same with The Owl House and their marvel shows
My experience is the opposite. It can be harder to find unpopular things, but there are very few things that aren't out there at all. More often (as is the case with Disney) piriacy can be your only option.
I do like having high quality physical media I can rip copies of myself when something is available but Disney doesn't like to give people that option no matter how recent/popular the show is.
We don't really have many official options for compensating creators either. It doesn't matter how much you watch The Owl House on disney+ it's not the same as writing Dana Terrace a check. Thankfully she was already compensated by Disney. Support for creators and their shows can be given in a lot of ways. You can always try to support a show you download by word of mouth promotion, seeding torrents, social media engagement, and buying merch.
Where X is some thing that may or may not be what the the poster actually wants, but the temptation to own them by saying it already exists is too great.
239 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadIf so, why?
Anybody who asks deserves to be chaffed into oblivion with garbage data.
Especially, who would be dumb enough to admit to being under 18, or, worse, under 13? An 8 year old should see the obvious reasons not to do that. A bright 6 year old.
I used to lie and say I was really old, but now I'm really old so I just lie at random.
Presumably some places appear to just be doing todays date-120/130 years. So its possible to create an account that likely won't be able to revalidate ones birthday using their age validators in a few years unless they adjust the age because you will be over what they think is the max age.
Its not like you can identify 87% of the US based on Date of birth, 5 digit Zip Code and gender. Oh wait. https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/index.ht...
"Verification" questions should get random answers that get saved in your password manager.
"Yes it's right bracket, exclamation, capital R, dollar sign..."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
I don't expect there's any reason for them to divide by a datetime...but one can hope that some ad server somewhere has crashed as a result.
My go-to birthday has always been January 1st of the year I was actually born. That way it doesn't raise any eyebrows if I want to convert something to a real account or interact with real people, but it fails verification if they mishandle my credentials.
That's worked great, except that one time when I inadvertently booked a flight on united.com (who should have my actual birthday, with whom I'd flown internationally several times before) with a session token or something set by a random travel search engine to whom I had given my fake January 1st birthday and then (I thought) abandoned before picking a different flight. Customs had pointed questions about the authenticity of my passport and driver's license, because their system showed that my documents should be different and they couldn't tell me why... They eventually let me back into the country, but that was not fun.
Not sure how much it would help at a border crossing... but with any kind of tech support it would immediately elicit a chuckle.
For websites that respect COPPA, under-13 might be your best bet for less targeting
ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
I guess in theory it could also trigger them to ask for a note from your parents...
I see now. Children under 13 are not currently permitted to register on the sites and apps for Disney Parks. For activities on apps and other online offerings, minor children under 13 years old may access some content under the supervision of a parent or guardian within that person's account.
ref: https://plandisney.disney.go.com/question/create-accounts-mi...
I know I've run into it at least once, I think maybe Microsoft, where having an unknown birth date on the account became a huge headache.
Lesson learned. Write stuff like this down in a vault too.
Ditto Marvel.
I'm not into SW and less into Marvel (I'm repulsed by ubiquitousness).
That said, I found Mandalorian, Boba Fett and Andor all enjoyable; I'm guessing because they stand pretty much alone.
Likewise, I dig Pennyworth and Legion. I was well into watching both before I realized they were Marvelesque. Less Marvel seems to be my favorite Marvel.
(At least with Star Wars, nostalgia for something they got into during childhood is a plausible explanation for anybody under 60 or so. But even so, I'm surprised more people don't grow out of it.)
That's a weird take. I read the books as an adult and they were genuinely entertaining. What's hard to explain about that? It's not as if books marketed to children are the only things I read, but I've read a lot of children's books as an adult that were delightful.
Why judge people as being simple? I hope you aren't afraid to try something that isn't marketed to your demographic out of fear that people will think the same of you. Most people aren't so weirdly judgey, and people afraid to step outside of the boundaries drawn for them by marketers are probably missing out on creative works they'd really enjoy.
During that month I watched the Pixar movies Soul, Luca, and Turning Red (and rewatched Onward). I also watched the Disney movies Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto. And Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs. Oh, and also the latest Dr. Strange and Thor Marvel movies, plus the Loki series.
Are you seriously claiming that all that was garbage?
If you get a kick out of it, then more power to ya. Disney even gives you a place to put your money where your mouth is. For my money though, there's a lot more entertainment value to be found elsewhere.
What they were making a decade ago was Cars 2 and Brave.
Brave was pretty good, but I'm having a hard time seeing it as better than Soul, Luca, or Turning Red. And I'm having an even harder time seeing that for Cars 2.
Pahe in India, Philipines, PSA on PM, MKVking and plenty of other options to download legally content even without torrenting.
This account was active for 2+ years and they out of the blue REQUIRED a birthday like wth.
It was a huge deal internally when "Custom" was added as a gender option in the sign-up flow, and even then, there's a nudge towards the binary to retain better ad targeting.
In addition to that, companies wants you to acknowledge that you're over 13 so they can be more loosey-goosey with data collection (thanks California!).
Did a significant amount of users pick this though?
It's odd that advertisers would dislike that change for targeting -- surely the people who pick "custom" are sending a major signal that correlates with other preferences. It's a third grouping they can specifically target! If they split "male" into "HYPER-MASCULINE ALPHA MALE: CARS, GUNS, AND FOOTBALL FUCK YEAH!" and "I have a penis but I try not to let it make decisions for me", advertisers should presumably love that distinction too. Of course the reality is that their decades of research deciding what constitutes "male" and "female" has gotten them stuck in a shitty local minimum and they can no longer abandon this binary concept that they cling desperately to without admitting that they've never actually known what the fuck they're doing.
It would take very little time to reap massive efficiencies in targeting, and the rest would be long-tail that would be discovered as budget allowed.
You would spend some time and money doing randomized exploration (maybe something more sophisticated with active learning, but just uniform random could work), then train a basic bidder to optimize whatever you are currently interested in.
The process of manually deciding which tags fit which ads is not long for this world.
The fact that something is a social construct doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Heck, once you get past the basic "keep this biological organism alive" level, most of human life is lived within social constructs. That doesn't meant they're not real or not meaningful.
In a society where someone of the male sex is pressureed to be male gendered there will be a larger correlation between gender and sex. Which would mean miracle balding cures would do better targeting the male gender if they don't have the inofrmation to target the male sex.
Those are terrible signals and really should be replaced with something better.
"Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule ("COPPA")"
If the kids is below 13, targeting would probably not be allowed.
"The act, effective April 21, 2000, applies to the online collection of personal information by persons or entities under U.S. jurisdiction about children under 13 years of age, including children outside the U.S. if the website or service is U.S.-based.[1] It details what a website operator must include in a privacy policy, when and how to seek verifiable consent from a parent or guardian, and what responsibilities an operator has to protect children's privacy and safety online, including restrictions on the marketing of those under 13.[2]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_...
a) there are laws involved
b) you have a variety of content/products specifically aimed at different ages
I won't speak to gender, that's certainly a different concept, but age doesn't exact ring alarm bells for me here.
Also Disney: “Tell us your gender so we can target ads based on that!”
I would take DIE advocates more seriously if they reformed themselves — rather than lecturing the rest of us while engaging in such blatant hypocrisy.
Calling "cultural marxism" on [checks notes] a *marketing ask* is like calling a restaurant a food bank because they both involve food.
Hah. Ok fine let's call it by the more academic term. It's still a thing and nothing was refuted by your comment.
To Lego's credit, they did seem to make a point of putting both girls and boys on their advertisements.
Marketing is what killed it. Boys followed “He-Man” and girls “She-Ra”.
Come to think of it, those are the most heavily gendered characters in existence. Look at their freaking names!
Marketing was responding to toy stores gendering the aisles; can't get on the shelf if the store doesn't know where to put your product.
I'm not sure what stores were responding to. Possibly the public.
Growing up I watched both He-man and She-Ra, in fact I thought She-Ra was the better show since it had a somewhat darker tone than He-Man did, but I didn't know any boys who owned She-Ra toys.
Jem and the Holograms was supposed to sell fashion dolls sold in the pink aisle (competing with Barbie), but the show itself was specifically written with lots of action to keep boys interested so they wouldn't change the channel and prevent their sisters from watching.
Anything more granular is marketing and advertising BS which they have no need for.
They could probably figure out watch preferences with good statistics, (and do), but asking for age probably gets them in the right ball park a lot faster.
I don't want to watch children's tv shows. They have never suggested children's shows to me.
My children don't want to watch bloody horror movies. They have never suggested bloody horror movies to them.
Sometimes I have to search for what I want. That's fine. Sometimes I don't, that's even nicer.
Tying things from what you watch to what you might want to watch will be miles more effective than your age, because your age has nothing to do with what shows you watch.
I've known parents to show their kids "The Passion of Christ" or "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." I also know parents who watch (and love) shows like Phineas and Ferb or Spongebob.
What? I apologize, but that is absurd. Entire industries are built around the idea that people of different ages _generally_ have different tastes.
Take the "children's" television network Nickelodeon - someone realized that kids like different shows than adults, so they made an entire, 24/7 tv network dedicated to it.
Then they realized that kids go to bed at an earlier hour, so they made "Nick at Nite" for adults where they showed reruns of old tv shows. Then they realized that really young kids like different shows than older ones, so they made Nick Jr. Then they realized that ~college age people liked different shows, so they made Adult Swim. Then they realized that some older adults wanted to watch classic cartoons so they made Boomerang.
These weren't one-off "oh, one person likes different shows". These were entire age-based demographics. And this is but one example, plenty of industries - especially entertainment industries - target exactly this.
And plenty of hard science is based on the fact that human brains "mature" and adapt over time. Young kids brains are different that geriatric brains,
That is not to say any of this perfect. As these algorithms collect what a person does and doesn't like or watch, they can and should change.
And if someone wants to show their kids "age innappropriate" material to their kids, that's there choice. But don't recommend "The Human Centipede" to a three year old when they turn on the tv, and don't recommend Cocomelon to me.
Things you are not entitled to know about your customers: anything else whatsoever.
Asking for people's age, gender, or whatever, is creepy and rude. Especially if you inconvenience the customer in the process.
And...
(a) You can comply with COPPA and similar laws by not collecting data on ANYBODY, which is what you should be doing anyhow. No sympathy.
(b) Let the customer decide what the customer wants, thank you very much.
The UK is pretty insistent that they will require almost every site on the internet to be suitable for under 13s or credit card age verify.
Anything you are legally allowed to.
For any questions or concerns please contact your senator.
Not everyone is ok with being profiled from every possible angle.
There is an official way to create <13 accounts though: https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338?hl=en
What about someone to revulcanize your tires for a couple of nickels?
The centenarian market is a goldmine, I tells 'ya!
I've been doing this for a while and it has yielded a purely-medical advertising experience. Old people don't buy anything else?
Believe me, there is no end to being a target market.
If some profile is routinely watching a show about makeup or horses or ballet dances, you have a pretty good guess about the age/gender. Likewise if some profile is watching a lot of shows about monster trucks, little league baseball, and RPG games, you likewise can make a pretty reasonable guess about who they are.
Playing video games, of any kind as an adult is such a norm today that it’s not entirely accurate to say “well this person plays Mario, let’s advertise crayola”,
Sometimes it does.
https://www.amazon.com/Ziploc-Sandwich-Featuring-Different-D...
What is happening with streaming services adding ads was entirely predictable because the financial incentives of a company that adopts a subscription model are to add ads to the subscription once they think they can get away with it. If they already have ads, the incentive is to add more and more of them until there's pushback (i.e. the NFL has been cutting down on commercial breaks because they got long enough and frequent enough to become a common source of fan complaints when ironically the 2 minute warning was originally added to the rulebook in the early 70s to guarantee TV broadcasters at least one commercial break each half that wasn't because the clock ran out on a quarter).
This is why all of the people who want a subscription based model for online services that are currently free are hopelessly naive. If they get their way, things will get better for a few years and then will eventually end up right back where they are but worse because you'll have to pay for the privilege of watching ads.
From a 1981 NYT article
> Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption, there has been a widespread impression - among the public, at least -that cable would be supported largely by viewers' monthly subscription fees. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_100 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WGN-TV [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPCH-TV
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
https://help.hulu.com/s/article/no-ads-exceptions
They aren't being forced to show ads. They chose too.
I used to recommend Netflix back in the day, cause it just worked. Now, there's 30+ different streaming services, and many have switched to the "leak an episode once a week/month".
Just pirate. It's better, cheaper, AND not hostile to the end user!
What do you recommend in the high seas, and how do you manage the threat of malware?
Then, I stick primarily with video and audio. I stay away from software piracy because I prefer my data to be in FLOSS formats.
MAKE SURE to use Firefox, with "uBlock Origin" and "Privacy Badger" plugins before going to any of these links. Also if you're on Windows, go enable in Windows Explorer to show "file extensions" - some torrents will be malware with movie.mp4.exe and try to trick you to run malware.
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Movies:
► DDL (Direct Download) ► Private Torrent Trackershttps://www.reddit.com/r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH/wiki/index/
But I've found there's a rather large contingent of anti-reddit people. And frankly, the wider this stuff is copied, the better we all are.
Heck, it could be even better, since your "mental" age based on your interests in movies could be more suitable for delivering ads then your actual age.
- Doesn't show ads, or steal your personal information.
- Has all the content from every major streaming service.
- Is scalable and efficient without a centralized single point of failure.
- Can be used with 100% free and open source software.
- Lets you keep your favorite shows forever without being subject to the whims of corporate licensing.
Edit: I also spend the extra money on a Criterion or Arrow release if it's available. These never have ads.
https://www.cbr.com/disney-no-current-plans-release-marvel-s...
I also prefer compensating creators.
I do like having high quality physical media I can rip copies of myself when something is available but Disney doesn't like to give people that option no matter how recent/popular the show is.
We don't really have many official options for compensating creators either. It doesn't matter how much you watch The Owl House on disney+ it's not the same as writing Dana Terrace a check. Thankfully she was already compensated by Disney. Support for creators and their shows can be given in a lot of ways. You can always try to support a show you download by word of mouth promotion, seeding torrents, social media engagement, and buying merch.
Where X is some thing that may or may not be what the the poster actually wants, but the temptation to own them by saying it already exists is too great.
We don't need curated ads.
We will seek them out so just put it ALL out there for us to choose at our time and privacy.