This article showed up on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to. I have mixed feelings (so what else is new?) about the state of “personalization technologies.” The existence of those profiles seems like a dream come true for the Total Information Awareness people (does your TiVo think you’re a terrorist? You aren’t the only one), despite the fact that they are clearly not all that useful for drawing conclusions about the profiled people. Or maybe the people complaining are just in denial.

My chosen on-line shopping site (buy.com) offers such recommendations as “People who bought Malcolm in the Middle also bought Big Fat Liar,” but they either don’t base their promotional mail on their customers’ purchasing history or their algorithms suck, since I keep being surprised every time a new MST3K shows up at Silver Platters.