by cmsellers » Sat Jan 04, 2020 5:11 pm
My YouTube recommendations are suddenly filled with irrelevant videos. These include "Say Yes to the Dress," "Girl Chat Vault," and a bunch of hair-and-makeup videos. And, I think I know what's going on.
I've struggled with my gender identity all my life, since well before I came out as nonbinary. As such, pretty much as long as I've been using the internet, if I don't have to specify gender and I didn't intend to use the site for dating purposes, I always left the gender field blank, and this includes my main Google account.
As such, Google has been trying to determine my gender from my online behavior for years. And, apparently, my YouTube viewing habits must recently have tipped "female" enough that Google decided I'm probably a woman and started recommending random "girly" stuff to me.
On one hand, I'm always pleased when people (or AIs, I guess) can't tell my gender or assume I'm female. On the other hand, really YouTube? Really? Watching videos about birds and cooking means I must be into gossip, weddings, and hair care videos?