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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Some additional info based on their published material (screenshot below). The software gets its data from “publicly available sources” which includes tracking information from many different online advertisers, public social media posts, etc. As we know, the advertising data can sometimes have your personal info attached - sometimes not. Babel Street claims to anonymize the data, but let’s assume there is a $$ amount at which they won’t.

    So, theoretically, if you can successfully avoid ad trackers, and you don’t post on social media platforms except where you want to be “seen”, you can avoid this tracking (granted that seems quite impossible these days).








  • I’m no expert in this subject either, but a theoretical limit could be beyond 200x - depending on the data.

    For example, a basic compression approach is to use a lookup table that allows you to map large values to smaller lookup ids. So, if the possible data only contains 2 values: One consisting of 10,000 letter 'a’s. The other is 10,000 letter 'b’s. We can map the first to number 1 and the second to number 2. With this lookup in place, a compressed value of “12211” would uncompress to 50,000 characters. A 10,000x compression ratio. Extrapolate that example out and there is no theoretical maximum to the compression ratio.

    But that’s when the data set is known and small. As the complexity grows, it does seem logical that a maximum limit would be introduced.

    So, it might be possible to achieve 200x compression, but only if the complexity of the data set is below some threshold I’m not smart enough to calculate.





  • Pretty confident if this happened because they hired a new (real) support operator who just didn’t understand the policy, they would have made a concession to the customer and the support person would likely just get more training.

    But because it’s a chat bot that they really don’t understand (outside of their IT department), they go to court and shut down a system they likely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing.

    This type of advanced decision making is why we pay CEOs the big bucks.