The internet has a personalization problem

All the big names promised me personalized news, but they all failed and failed again

Tarek Amr
6 min readSep 3, 2022

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Privacy online is everyone’s concern.

When apps and websites started to track us, they promised us a better experience. The promise of a personalized content was their justification for their tracking cookies and hidden pixels.

Photo by Yasamine June on Unsplash

But, unlike Amazon’s same-day delivery, this promise was never delivered. Not even by Amazon itself.

News, the ultimate personalization frontier

Before the internet, the mass media helped us keep tabs of what matters: New movie releases in our local theatres, road closures, the weather forecast, as well as every other piece of news that we needed for our next small talk occasion with our neighbours.

The term “mass media” is an antonym for personalization. Nevertheless, even they catered better to my needs than the likes of Meta (Facebook) and Alphabet (Google).

Screenshot of Google news, taken by the author

Here is what Google News think is the most relevant news to me today:

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Tarek Amr

I write about what machines can learn from data, what humans can learn from machines, and what businesses can learn from all three.