Here's a User Experience “Pro Tip” that I would have thought unnecessary to spell out.
It's not personalization unless you've asked me.
Asking me is the very essence of personal.
Using data you got without asking
is impersonalization.
At worst, it is an invasion of privacy, or outright stalking.
It is not impressive, it is just garden-variety creepy, to have clever tools that can guess anything about me based on my location, my past behavior, knowledge of who I know, observations about who I interact with, or a record of what I buy.
Whether you bought my details or inferred them doesn't matter.
What matters is me having real choice.
You'll know when it's personal information because I've personally given it to you or approved its use. Short of that, it's surveillance data.
Author’s Notes:
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I have previously also written about this idea of impersonalization in a political context. See Impersonal Politics.
This post began as a complaint to weather.com, where I have a paid/premium account. They have a long-standing bug where at startup they show me weather for a town I don't care about. My internet provider, Fidium (a service I absolutely do not recommend), wrongly reports my home's location. But it's not just that. weather.com uses that information when I've asked them not to look for my current location at all. I don't want them to know or care where I am as I move around during the day. I just want to ask about weather at locations I specify and get answers. They needn't know why I'm asking. This is an easy technical request, requiring no intelligence, no expensive data streams, no “AI.” All this requires is respect for what I personally want.
The image was generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT Image 2.5), with light post-processing in GIMP to build a preview version of the image and to reduce the final images in size for faster web download.
